Multimedia Production Guide

Best Practices for Creating Credits in Video Essays

Scrolling credits are not ideal for most video essay projects, especially when using an academic citation style. A better option is to use series of 4-second static slides at the end of the video to attribute the sources used.

Sources from Your Bibliography

You should group your sources by category, with a separate slide for each category: “Research Sources,” “Image/Video Sources,” and “Audio Sources.”

As for individual citations, please follow the style’s syntax as directed by your instructor (e.g., APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.) and/or as outlined in the Citing Sources Guide.


Tips:

• Use a black background with white text 
• Copy-and-paste a portion from your bibliography into the preview window
• Change the font to Arial (a screen-optimized font) and resize the text size to 10-point size

Production Credits

Although production credits will fit nicely on its own slide following the bibliographic sources, there is a bit more freedom with how you stylize the production credits. At a minimum, you should still include these components:

Individual Credits. If you are working as a group, you should include each individual and their respective role in the production. If it was a single-person project, the convention is to list a person’s name only once, even with multiple titles (e.g.,  “Written and Produced by [your name]”).

Purpose. A short statement such as, “This video was produced for [course name] at [institution’s name] in [semester, year]” will suffice.