Recently, I have been working on a film called The Right Girls. It is a story of several transgender women crossing Mexico together last year during the high-profile migrant caravan.
As we got into wrapping postproduction, one of the producers on the project had mentioned a company called Endcrawl to create the credits for the film. Put simply, they set up a Google document, you plug in your information, and in minutes it renders and exports your credits, allowing them to be downloaded and inserted into the film. Initially I was very opposed to this. Being the cliché indie filmmaker, I didn’t want to spend $1000 for something I could do in After Effects, but I agreed to give the demo a try and was thrilled I did.
“I used to run a post facility called ‘Off Hollywood,’” says John ‘Pliny’ Eremic, one of the co-founders of Endcrawl. “I remember getting so sick of sending a word document back and forth with things highlighted in purple telling a graphic designer to make the changes then someone exports the changes then having to watch it the next day to see if the changes had actually been made”
After selling his company, Pliny decided to create software that could make this process smoother. Initially he would have people send their Google documents to him and then he would export them on his laptop and dropbox them back to the client. Eventually they developed this process into a fully automated service.
When you first sign up for the software, it sets up a Google Sheet with the title of your film and all the typical fields people use in a film, director, producer, editors with another column for the name. As you scroll down through the document, you find a spot for copyright information, music information, legal notice, and all the logos that accompany the end of a film.
From there jump into their portal where you customize everything about your credits like font, color, shape, and size. Then render them out as a DPX. 2K or 4K. All in under 30 minutes. “Because credits are normally black and white, we can zip a DPX and with 2K we get a 50:1 compression and 4K it is 100:1, allowing us to deliver a file that is between 2 and 2.5GB.” Pliny adds that the reason they can do all this so quickly, unlike other software that does a little of everything, is that theirs is dedicated making end credits.
I am not the only one finding this intriguing. This year at Sundance nearly a third of all films used Endcrawl for their credits. Some of their other movies of note are:
- Moonlight
- Halloween
- 10 clover lane
- Harriet
- Icorice
- Free Solo
- The Report
- Dark Waters Bad mounts two
- Dirty Grandpa
- Honey boy
- late night
- beast of no nation
- the big sick
- Snowden
- She Racks
- 13th
Pricing starts at $500 for 2K and $1000 for 4K, and the best part is you only have to pay once you decide to render. Set up the Google document during pre-production for organizing the film and then, before you export it, pay the fee and within the hour have your credits done and the clients are happy.
“Because we are remote company, when we meet people, it is a love fest. Endcrawl is like extra strength aspirin. It takes the pain away right away,” Pliny closes with.
After realizing how much time and energy their algorithm was saving our little independent production, I will never go back to the “cheap method” of making credits. Time is money, and thanks to Endcrawl, I am saving time and putting that energy into The Right Girls.