About this tool
Star Wars Opening Crawl Generator
Star Wars Crawl creates a scrolling opening crawl with your own text.
How to use it
- Enter your title and body text.
- Play the crawl.
- Watch it scroll into the distance.
How the effect is made
The crawl is a perspective transform: the text plane is tilted away from the viewer so the top is further off, and then scrolled upward along that plane. Text shrinks and converges as it recedes, which is what produces the sense of depth.
In 1977 there was no way to do this digitally. The original was shot physically, with a camera moving over a large printed sheet of text laid on the floor. A CSS transform now does in three lines what took a specially built rig.
When it helps
- A themed intro for a video or a presentation.
- A joke announcement for a group.
- A birthday or event message with some ceremony.
- Learning how CSS 3D transforms behave.
Common mistakes
- Writing too much. The crawl is slow by design and a long body takes several minutes to pass.
- Using long words, which look cramped as the text narrows toward the top.
