Star Wars Party Invitations – Opening Crawl

At the beginning of every Star Wars movie is the iconic opening crawl. I read somewhere that this was actually one of the harder special effects for them to do in the first movies because they didn’t use digital effects back then. Crazy thing is that you now can make your own opening crawl in a matter of minutes.

For my son’s recent Star Wars party we decided to use the opening crawl as the star wars party invitations. But it would also be fun to have it playing at the entrance of the party too.

It was so much fun to do and really easy to make.

How to make a Stars Wars Opening Crawl

Step 1: The Text
First you have to write the text you want to use. I watched through some of the movies’ opening crawls and decided to base mine off “Return of the Jedi.” Feel free to copy mine or come up with your own.

Episode VII
Return of the Party

[Insert name] has returned to his home planet at [insert address] in an attempt to rescue his friend Hans Solo from the clutches of the vile gangster Jabba the Hutt.

Little does [insert name] know that the GALACTIC EMPIRE has secretly begun construction on a birthday party for [insert date and time] that is even more powerful than the first dreaded Death Star.

When completed, this ultimate party will spell certain doom for the small band of rebels struggling to restore freedom to the galaxy.

In order to succeed, [insert name] and his fellow Jedi will need to invade the party, enjoy snacks and cake, practice their Jedi skills, and defeat the Empire.

In order to make sure the rebels are adequately equipped for Jedi training, please RSVP by [insert date]. If possible, come dressed in a white t-shirt and khaki pants.

Step 2: Making the Crawl
The Star Wars website has a really cool opening crawl creator on it that easily lets you plug in your text. But I recommend saving your text elsewhere too because sometimes it can get a little buggy.

You just click “Begin” and then “Editor” in the upper right. Once you click “Done” the crawl will play for you.

Step 3: Save the Crawl
Here is the tricky part. Unfortunately the crawl creator has an annoying bug and it won’t let you save or share your crawl. After spending a ton of time troubleshooting, I found in some forums that lots of other people are having the same problem. Ugh. I tried some other creators, but they didn’t work very well. And then I had an idea!

Luckily the crawl will allow you to view it in full screen, so if you record your screen you can record the crawl. I have an Apple, so I used QuickTime Player’s screen recording feature. It is basically what a lot of those computer tutorials use to record what they are doing on the screen.

You just click File and select “New Screen Recording.” To start recording, you click the round record button and to stop you can either click the stop button in the menu bar or press the Command-Control-Escape key combination (all at once) on the keyboard.

You will also want to click on the triangle to expand the other options and select to use the built-in microphone so that you can record the music too.

Since you really can’t perfectly sync starting the crawl with the recording, I started the recording, opened and started the crawl in full screen mode, and then hit Command-Control-Escape at the end. Then I was able to use the trim feature in QuickTime to trim out the extra from the beginning and end. Be sure to save your final video.

Step 4: Share the Crawl
Once your video is all done, you can upload it to your video service of choice. I just used YouTube and then shared the link using email and social media.