Subtitles and Title Cards - Styles and Use Cases

By Giovanni Peresson 20/04/2023

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Concept:

Throughout Filmmaking and video creation subtitles/captions and title, cards have a variety of purposes from making your content more accessible to a wider audience whether it be aiding people with hearing difficulties or trying to reach an international audience through translation. Subtitles can also have a comedic role, especially with fast-paced content good example of this would be video game content.

For this project, my aim was to showcase three different styles and use cases to show how they affect the video and also can make content more accessible to different. I used some footage from a previous first-year project of a talking head interview I had with a local photographer Seimi Ferry.

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My Process

I started off in Adobe Premier where I started my timeline and did a little bit of color grading to the footage as recently I have made that a habit in recent weeks and months when working on any sort of project.

Then in After Effects where I created an intro title using text and a white box I made in Photoshop. I rotated it at an angle so that it would cut across the screen diagonally on the 16:9 frame. Then Using Keyframing I animated the white box so that it would slide in.

I also created a text that showed the title and the person being interviewed. Also using keyframing I animated the text so that it would slide in from the sides. When doing this I made use of the safety guides for creating text as seen in the picture here.

Starting with the first style of captions I created the general closed captions style of subtitles generally used as a disability aid, translations, or for dialogue that may be difficult to understand such as strong accents, etc. for this I used an easily readable font a medium size as to not obstruct the actual footage too much. I put an opaque black background behind the text as well to make it more readable on white/lighter backgrounds.

I made sure not to make each subtitle too long so that it could be read at a reasonable pace and also made sure to make the timing was correct. By taking these various measures I felt I created effective subtitles for the style and use case I was trying to portray.

The second style is a style I like to call the "Finzar" This style was made popular by a creator and practitioner Finzar whose real name is not public. It is a more comedic style of subtitle and generally, it is used mostly on social media and used to add comedic effect to jokes or funny moments. Normally for this style of subtitle, I personally use the Space Comics font but for some reason at the time of creating the edit for the blog so I used the same font I used in the first for the purposes of this blog.

For this style, I start by creating my subtitle which I will use as a template. I created a text box with some letters and then used scale and motion I keyframe the effect. It starts at 80% scale then you go forward a couple of frames bringing it to 120% and then back to 100%, as well I add a bit of bolding to characters. This creates a subtle pop-in effect on the subtitles. I then copy and paste it adding the transcription to it across the rest of the section of footage.

The third and final style is generally more useful for documentary or factual content and works very well with the talking head shot adding motion and depth to what can be generally a very mundane shot on its own. It is a fade-in fade-out for each word, each word stays for about 2 seconds and disappears before the sentence is complete. A way of imagining this is the type of subtitle you would find in a sort of inspirational video.

This style is one I've never used before so this was my first time doing it. I started off in the top right with a text box 2 seconds long and put a fade in and a longer fade out to each word individually. positioning, timing, and doing each word individually wasn't particularly difficult although this style of subtitle is by far the most time-consuming and tedious of the three but also the most dramatic and impactful.

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My Reflection and What I have learned:

Trying out new styles of subtitles and really thinking about when is most appropriate to use them has made me think more about how when and where I can use them in future projects. Also using closed captions in future projects to make them more accessible to a wider audience in terms of both disability aid and also different languages, for example, translating English projects into Irish and vice versa is something I would like to put more effort into.

It also important to note that using subtitles in just regular viewing has become more and more popular over recent years. A study by idealinsight.co.uk has revealed that on Netflix "66% of people use subtitles to better understand the storyline" (ideal insight, 2022). This number is a significant number and this trend also follows on the youtube platform where in my own experience looking at video analytics on various channels of mine I was always shocked by how significant it was.

Aswell people use subtitles simply to just understand better which can be seen on a youtube documentary Why we all need subtitles now (Edward Vega, Vox, 2023). They also cover how in the film they mix the audio to suit theaters with high-quality surround sound which in most homes is simply not possible to get a level of sound quality so when played on smaller speakers even on televisions, phones, headphones it's not going to be as clear and this one the major factors in why subtitles have become so commonplace when a few years ago people never really used unless they where watching foreign films or had hearing issues.

By using subtitles not only do you create more accessible content but you also appeal to the average viewer this has become an important aspect content creators and filmmakers will have to fulfill in the future and it wouldn't surprise me if we see this trend more and more in the future.

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references:

Why we all need subtitles now idealinsight.co.uk