USING VIDEO GAME FONTS AND ELEMENTS IN FCPX

Today we received a request from a student hoping to create something like the following in Final Cut Pro:

The student indicated an interest in incorporating fonts and graphics that felt like retro 2D video game elements. So we pulled together these resources to get things started!

FONTS

Google Fonts is a reliable and safe place to go searching for fonts, and for this project, their Press Start 2P looks promising.

There are also quite a number of free font sites you can check out, just be careful! We've had pretty good luck with dafont and 1001fonts. Joystix is available on these sites and is free for commmercial use.

Just download the fonts, unzip the .zip file, and drag the font files into "Font Book" on your Mac to install them.

OTHER ELEMENTS

You can find reference stills from all the classic games all over the web, but another interesting option would be to record a screencast of yourself playing one of the many web-based classic game emulators, like this version of PacMan.

Go ahead and start up Quicktime, select File => New Screen Recording, and play away.

PUTTING THINGS TOGETHER IN FINAL CUT

Once in Final Cut, you'll be able to create text in any of the fonts you've installed, and you can use Final Cut's built in tools to recreate some of simple elements from these games, or to crop and manipulate found footage and stills. Here is a short video tutorial to get you started:

And that should get you started! Like we say in the video, please get in touch with any more questions you may have!