The main thing I want to say about credits is that you should check, double check, quintuple check, check, check, check the spelling of your credits. This may seem a no brainer but as you are reaching the finish line, with a million tiny little and not so tiny little fires to put out, credits are, often times, the last thing the filmmaker is thinking about but they are as important as anything else in the film. I say this because they are a sign of respect for those who worked on the film and this could be the only payment your crew is getting. A credit and the experience, which may be significant to them. Most importantly, make sure you ask each individual on your crew how they want their name to appear. Some people like to be formal about this although you may know them as Squiggy or Little Jim or even Bob they may surprise you and want to use their given name of Robert J. Periwinkle IV or something. Now, if you did the proper legal thing and had your crew sign work for hire waivers when they started, because, unitl you do anyone who works for you owns their work. You should have them put down the credit they would like on the form. Then when you are putting the credit list together double check with them the spelling and the way they want their name.
The other thing to check is the spelling of the department names. Believe me this will save you much, much money and head ache. I am perhaps the worst speller in the world. Actually, the second worst. Leo's Art Director, Craig Foster, is the worst. So we were doomed. If Adobe would only put a spell check in Photoshop I might have saved something like 500 dollars and a lot of frustration. You see, when we went to film and sent all the film resoultion tiff files up to the lab, Alpha Cine in Seattle, they noticed the credit headers Sculptor and a couple of others were spelled wrong. This was my fault totally. I had concentrated so much on the peoples' names I didn't think of the headers. No one had noticed up until this point, even though the film had shown publicly several times before this. Shows you how much people read the credits. So now, just when I thought we were done, I was faced with a decision. Fix them or do nothing. To fix them, I would need to re-output the credits (after fixing the spelling of course) which was not an easy thing to do given Craig's schedule, color correction and the fact that I was traveling with my family when all this went down. I would also have to buy another hard drive to send these enormous files to the lab. A couple of hundred bucks plus fedex. The other option - to do nothing. Well, no one had noticed to that point, Leonardo da Vinci himself was a bad speller, and maybe it would be part of the charm of the piece. Of course none of these arguments holds any water, just the ramblings of a lunatic wanting to finish his film. So fix the credits we did. An expensive and embarrasing mistake that I pass on to you to learn from and avoid.
