Production - Editing Part 4: Finalizing the Title Card

There is something almost funny about the fact that the title card which is maybe three seconds of the finished film ended up being one of the most complicated things to actually get working. After everything that had already gone sideways during this project, from the weather delays to the wind noise to Eid landing right in the middle of our editing window, I had, of course, thought that importing a PNG into Premiere Pro was going to be the easy part.

The Export Problem

When Nicole finished the title card design in Canva, we hit a wall almost immediately. The version with the modified question mark and incorporated the books and the hockey stick to represent Audrey and Mattias was the design we were both most excited about. It felt specific to the story in a way that the earlier, simpler drafts didn't. But when we went to export it, Canva was only giving us a PDF output for that version of the file.

PDFs do not behave the way image files do inside Premiere Pro. You cannot resize them cleanly, you cannot adjust individual elements, and layering them over footage the way we needed to was not working the way we had planned. I spent longer than I want to admit trying to figure out whether there was a workaround, and Nicole did too. There wasn't one that was going to give us a clean result in the time we had left.

What it looked like exported and cropped

This was very frustrating because the question mark design had been the solution to a whole other problem as the soccer ball O idea that hadn't worked out  and now this version wasn't cooperating either. At some point you have to recognize when a creative direction has hit a practical limit and make a decision.

Building the Title Card in Premiere Pro

Because importing a clean version of the Canva design was not going to work, I ended up rebuilding the title card from scratch directly inside Premiere Pro using the Essential Graphics panel. This meant finding a font that matched what we had been going for with Norwester as closely as possible, which turned out to be its own challenge.

Premiere Pro has a lot of fonts available and most of them are not what you are looking for when you need something specific. I went through quite a few options trying to find something that had the same bold, clean, slightly geometric quality that Norwester had in the Canva version. Some were too rounded, some were too condensed, some had stylistic details that made them feel wrong for a rom-com title even if they looked strong on their own. It took longer than it should have, and there were a few moments where I had to stop myself from just picking something and moving on before I had actually found the right one.

Eventually I landed on a font that I felt captured the same spirit and was bold enough to read instantly, clean enough not to distract from what was happening in the shot underneath it. It was not a perfect match for Norwester, but in context, against the footage and with the hot pink color applied, it held up.

What the Title Card Does in Context

Something I kept coming back to while we were finalizing this is that the title card does not exist in isolation. It is the last thing the audience sees before the film ends, and everything leading up to it, like  the warm color grade shifting in when Audrey and Mattias collide, the non-diegetic record scratch cutting through the scene, the camera racking focus from the characters to the ball,  has already done the work of establishing tone. The title card just has to land cleanly on top of all of that.

I went back and looked at some of the title cards from the films I researched earlier in the process. Anyone But You uses clean, unfussy lettering which was confident typography that tells you immediately what kind of film you are watching. Our simplified version actually sits closer to that reference than the embellished question mark version would have. The directness is part of what makes it feel like a rom-com title. Bright color, bold font, the title lands and fades to black. Genre conventions exist because they work, and this was a case where simplifying brought us closer to what those conventions actually look like in practice.

vs.

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In context it reads exactly the way we wanted it to. Competitive, Much? as a title has always had a built-in playfulness to it, and the typography honors that.

Reflection

The honest version of this is that the final title card is not exactly what Nicole and I set out to make, but it is good, and I have stopped being bothered by the difference. The question mark embellishment was a smart idea that ran into a technical reality, rebuilding in Premiere Pro meant navigating a font library that made a simple decision feel more complicated than it needed to be, and at every stage the right call was to keep moving rather than keep chasing the original vision.

What we ended up with is clean, it is genre-appropriate, it works inside the edit, and it looks like it belongs in the film we actually made. After months of scheduling around drama rehearsals and Ramadan and Nicole not having Premiere Pro access and weather that would not cooperate, watching the full sequence play through with the title card sitting where it was supposed to sit felt like enough. Everything accumulated into that moment, and it looked like a film opening.