Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay about how to decipher a film’s end credits.
Maybe this is the one year anniversary of the pandemic talking, but god I’m feeling wistful about movie credits. More specifically, I’m longing for that specific, now fatefully nostalgic, experience of sitting in a theater after the lights have come up and watching the credits roll. A quiet hum of chatter fills the air as patrons file out. Maybe your friends begin to disclose first impressions. And as the weight of the film (good, bad, or mediocre) lifts, you sit and pay your dues to that gargantuan wall of text.
In a theater, credits feel like solid proof that filmmaking takes work; that behind all the hype, diversion, and artistry is a complex and intricate machine of project management. Posters and opening credits sequences hold a different, but equally powerful, appeal. There’s nothing like seeing a film blind and discovering, as the titles roll, that it stars some unexpected big players or that the director has disowned the project and donned a pseudonym.
But, whimsy aside, the fact remains that movie credits can be more than a little complicated. What does it mean for a credit to be above or below “the line”? What is the difference between a story credit and a writing credit? And what is the deal with those actor credits couched in “with…” or “and….as…”? All this, and more, are explained in the below video. If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to decipher movie credits, this is a grand place to start:
Watch “Who’s Who in the Movie Credits“:
Who made this?
Filmmaker IQ is a YouTube channel disseminating all manner of film history and know-how. Their videos range from the highly technical (what to do if your green screen footage has something green in it) to the opinionated (are superhero movies destroying cinema?). Site-creator and director John P. Hess is our narrator. You can subscribe to Filmmaker IQ on YouTube here. And you can follow them on Twitter here.
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Related Topics: Filmmaking, The Queue
