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Add a Star Wars-style opening crawl in PandaStudio
PandaStudio's Story crawl scrolls a title and paragraphs away into the distance on a tilted plane, like a film's opening crawl, with Lean back (0 to 80 degrees) and Turn (-60 to 60 degrees) controls.
The crawl is drawn with real perspective: lines shrink as they travel away, and the plane can lean back and turn left or right. Type up to 6,000 characters, leave a blank line between paragraphs, and set the Length; the text travels the whole way in that time. Put it over a starfield or any footage. It is a style, not an official Lucasfilm asset.
In the app
- 1Move the playhead to where the crawl should start.
- 2Open the Lower 3rds tab and click Story crawl under Live styles.
- 3In the Selected panel, type a Title and your Text, with a blank line between paragraphs.
- 4Set Lean back (60 is the classic look, 0 is a flat roll) and Turn (0 is straight on).
- 5Type the Length in seconds. 20 to 40 seconds reads comfortably for a few paragraphs.
- 6Under Look, set Size to XL, a bold font and a yellow text colour for the classic style.
Ask the AI
Open the AI chat in the editor and say any of these. The agent does the edits for you.
Examples
The classic settings
Lean back 60, Turn 0, Size XL, a heavy sans font, text colour #FFD23F, over a black starfield. Leave a blank line between paragraphs so they read as separate blocks.
CLI & MCP
Every capability is a verb, reachable from the terminal or from an MCP agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, Continue, Claude Desktop).
pandastudio project.add-motion-element --id=$ID --type=crawl --atMs=0 --durationMs=25000 --content='{"title":"Episode One","text":"It is a period of creative momentum...","tilt":60,"turn":0}' --style='{"size":"xl","font":"Poppins","color":"#FFD23F"}'