Chapter 20. iMovie for iOS Themes, Titles, and Transitions

You must choose a theme for every iMovie project you make on your iPhone or iPad. A theme is a collection of coordinated titles, transitions, and music that tie your shots together and make your movie look professionally done. Each theme comes with three special titles, one unique transition style, and a theme song.

Besides the titles and transitions that come as part of a theme, iMovie offers an additional eight titles and four transitions. That’s not a terribly big catalog, but it includes the most popular ones. (The truth is, you should be keeping things simple most of the time anyway. It helps people focus on your movie, instead of your titles and transitions.)

This chapter covers theme basics and then talks more about using titles and transitions.

Themes

What does a theme actually do for you? Unless you can carry a film post-production team around in your pocket, complete with editors, animators, and musicians, a theme is the easiest way to give your project the appearance of a professionally produced movie.

iMovie for iOS offers eight themes: Modern, Bright, Playful, Neon, Travel, Simple, News, and CNN iReport. Each one has an analogous theme in iMovie for the Mac; if you want to edit the same movie on both your portable and desktop device (by transferring the movie between the two—see Preview Full Screen), choose one these themes.

Theme titles and transitions behave just like non-theme titles and transitions (explained ...

Get iMovie: The Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.