Titles and motion
A consistent title system and annotations that help the viewer follow the work.
The short version
What you get. Consistent titles and useful on-screen explanations, designed for the format and the viewer.
Is this for you? For videos where titles, diagrams or annotations carry part of the explanation. Not if you want everything labelled: an annotation goes on where a viewer would otherwise stop and search.
What leaves your plate. The title system, rendered graphics and annotations, coordinated with your other contributors. Editable source files are agreed separately.
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What a title is for, and who it is for
Annotations answer the useful question
The techniques and terms a viewer would stumble on get written on the screen, and the ones they would not are left alone, because a label answering a question nobody had is just one more thing competing with what they should be watching. It is there because a lesson opens small gaps, and a viewer who falls into one stops learning and starts scrolling. The test is easy enough to run. Watch it as somebody who does not already know, and find the moment where they would reach for a search bar.
Titles are built in their own project and arrive finished
Type lives in a reusable After Effects project per partner and lands on the timeline as a rendered clip. It sounds indirect. It is what makes a caption behave on its fortieth outing exactly as it did on its first, and it means the person cutting tonight's video is not also quietly redesigning the brand's typography while they do it.
Whether the quantity goes on the card is the brand's decision
One channel's ingredient cards name the thing and leave the amount off, because a two-second shot cannot carry both and stay readable. Where two items go into the pan together they are stacked onto one card and given the time of both. The same brand's advertising version puts the amount back, since that viewer is deciding whether to cook rather than watching somebody cook. Get it wrong in either direction and the video is unreadable or useless, and both of those look perfectly fine in the edit.
Space is left for somebody else's work
On one partnership the closing animation is ours and everything before it is deliberately left clear, because the brand's own team animates those passages. A title system that fills every gap available to it is a title system somebody downstream has to undo, usually at the point where they are least able to afford the time.
The rules type follows once a brand has them
One face, one weight, one size band
Each partner's type is written down: the family, the point-size band per format, the colours as hex values. One brand rules out serif faces entirely. None of these are preferences of ours. They belong to the brand and are recorded so the fortieth video has not drifted somewhere the first one would not recognise.
Order and alignment carry meaning
An ingredient list follows the order the presenter says the items in, never the order the recipe was written in, so the words and the voice agree. Long titles align to whatever already occupies that edge of the frame, usually a logo, so the screen reads as laid out instead of assembled.
Colour comes from the content
On one channel the title colour is taken from the dish: red where tomatoes lead, green where the greens do. It is a small thing and it costs a minute per video. It is also why those titles look as though they belong to the food, instead of to a template with the brand's palette poured into it.
At the bench
The work, demonstrated
Try a decision from the craft: drag, tap or toggle, then read the trade-off.
These are illustrative models; no partner’s results are shown.
More demonstrations at the bench →An annotation earns its place by removing a question.
What changes for you
A consistent title system that supports the explanation, with room for your brand and other contributors.
Related: Subtitles and captions · Colour grading · Long-form editing · Multi-camera editing
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