2. FONTS I used dafont.com to look for a font for the title ‘The Steps’. I searched under the categories of Eroded, Distorted, Destroy, Horror and Halloween. I wanted something which would fit with the horror genre, a font that looked a little bloody or reminded people of the forest. I made a list of possible fonts: Wild Wood, Bosque Encantado, Face Your Fears, Double Feature, Nightbird, Bloody, Friday 13th, and Pulse Sans Virgin. Eventually, I settled on Face Your Fears.
3. I started a new blank psd file and filled it with black. I then switched the foreground colour to red bf0000
4. I selected the font ‘Face Your Fears’ and put it to size 60, then in the centre of the black box on screen I typed the title ‘The Steps’.
5. I created a new layer and filled it with the same red I had used for the text.
6. I copied the first text layer of ‘The Steps’ and moved it above the red layer. I then highlighted all of the text and changed the colour from red to black so that it would show.
7. I went to the animation (frames) bar on the bottom and duplicated the first frame, with red text on a black background, eight times. Then I selected the last four frames, and unclicked the small ‘eye’ icon in the layers bar next to the red layer and the 2nd ‘The Steps’ layer – so the black text on red would show instead.
8. Next, I moved the frames with black text on red, in between the original red text on black frames – then highlighting all of the frames, set the speed to 0 seconds so that it would play without delay and become ‘flashing’..
9. To imitate American Psycho’s beginning with the off white colouring, I created a new layer and with the colour picked chose a similarly off-white colour to fill the layer with.
10. I copied the text layer again, and went to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur. I then set the angle to 20 degrees at a distance of 10 pixels and clicked OK.
11. I copied ‘The Steps’ layer again, copy 3, and set the layer to ‘Darken’ right underneath the blurred copy – this would make this frame of text blurred, darker, heavier and thicker.
12. Using the ‘smudge’ tool, I smudged the bottom of each letter downwards as if blood running down a window pane, or glass, or perhaps a cinema screen.
13. I copied this layer and then repeated the step, smudging the smudges further down the screen till they got near the end. I then selected all of the frames where there was an off white coloured background and changed the timing to 0.5 seconds so it would be a little slower near the end, after all the red and black flashing.
14. I went back to the very first frame and set the timing to 2.0 seconds so that the original, normal red on black background would be still for a couple of moments before the clashing would begin.
15. My final step was to save it as a gif file. I went to File > Save for Web & Devices > I checked that it would only loop once and then saved it as ‘the steps titling’ > OK. I then opened it in Adobe ImageReady as mentioned in the presentation where the New Line Cinema logo was edited, and saved it there as a QuickTime movie so that it could then be imported into iMovie HD.
