AustinvilleCredits

"A Fine Day in Austinville"

Opening & Closing Credits

General Constraints

Web-distributed episodes usually have very short credit sequences, ranging from five seconds (Mr Deity) to about twelve (red vs blue). This makes sense -- nobody wants to sit through a three-minute credit sequence for a three-minute episode, and with streaming video it's very hard to skip past a credit sequence you've seen a bunch of times before. (One can imagine many viewers surfing from one episode to another repeatedly, so keeping the repeated content short would be considerate.)

It has to look good when it's youtube-sized.

Ideally, it should convey the concept of the show: all these sketches take place during a single day in a city similar to, but not quite identical to, Austin. And it will be funny.

Possible Text

KarinKross has suggested three cards: "Austinville!" "Starring [name(s)]" "[Episode title]".

PeterRogers suggested just two cards: "One Day in Austinville" "#x: [Episode title] <p> [Time of day]".

(Note from Peter: I like this because it conveys (1) the single-day thing, (2) the idea that there are at least 'x' episodes.)

The last frame of the closing credits should include the web site: http://austinville.austinimprov.com.

Some Possible Imagery

KarinKross and Bruce suggested showing a night shot with "Austinville" in neon on a local building (this can be done with Photoshop). Bruce referred to a Skinny Puppy album cover for reference.

PeterRogers here: I've got a still image that's been lingering in my head since I started on this: the skyline of Austin, only with a couple of massive nuclear-plant cooling towers Photoshopped in. I like that this conveys how something takes place across a whole city, and (if we can make the skyline look wrong enoug) how that city is not quite real.1 (If it were video, it would be a tiny bit like the closing title card for the Edmond Bulldogs.)

Whatever we go with, we should do the same imagery for each episode's credit sequence, just so we're absolutely certain our audience realizes it's all part of the same series.

Suggestion from JonathanVanMatre: Instead of Photoshopping in nuclear towers, maybe you could use the Seaholm power plant smokestacks in the foreground, looming over the skyline behind them. With some creative color timing, that could look pretty sinister. (PeterRogers: point taken -- although we aren't going for 'sinister' as much as 'clearly not quite the Austin we know'.)

Opening and Closing Theme

PeterRogers here: when I imagine the theme music to Austinville, I think "jaunty but off-kilter". Jaunty the way that, say, Mr Deity is jaunty, or David Schwartz's theme for Arrested Development. Cheerful and quick-paced and fun.

What do I mean by "off-kilter"? The best example I can think of is "Outside" by the Trash Can Sinatras; it might sound perfectly normal on first listen, but when you listen closer, you find notes that take several minute to glissando down half an octave and weird things like that. I think of the show as "like Terry Gilliam, only dialed back to around 5%", and I'd like that barely-discernible "off" quality to translate into the music.

I imagine it with guitars in -- only because guitar-based blues/rock is such a strong component of the Austin music scene.

JonathanVanMatre adds: The time constraint means it will be difficult to do anything that's particularly "song"-ish. Note that even the most terse of televised theme songs tend to be more than 5 seconds long (even that spacy press-synth-pad-and-hold theme for Lost is longer than that). Even the Mr. Deity bit, while jaunty and fun, sounds very musicus interruptus.

So, what I'm thinking is a three-beat opening theme, synced to the cards as follows. Card 1: gentle cacophony of city sounds and sped-up blues riffs, Card 2: Abrupt thwak! followed by bits of fret noise, Card 3: 2-chord slide blues change that fades out slowly as we fade into the episode. I can probably hum this better than I can explain it here, but I think it will convey what you're going for.

For closing credits, I may attempt to do a brief little fret-tappy thing in the vein of Kaki King. Or maybe just play the opening thing backwards.

(The PeterRogers sez: groovy!)

Footnotes

1 Plus it hints (in the long, long view) towards a storyline we're toying with that would occur at that nuclear power plant and cause a city-wide blackout at 8pm.