Subtitle Theory and Practice

I spend a lot of time working with subtitles and thinking about subtitles, about how to make them easy to read and understand so they distract minimally from the visual storytelling. Here are some rules I’ve come up with that you can ignore at your peril (a few are more to my aesthetic taste rather than hard rules.) One thing to bear in mind, which you’ll discover as soon as you start, is that it takes longer to read something than it takes to say it, so we’re always fighting to keep our subtitles on screen for an extra moment whenever we can. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to follow a speaker’s point and the subtitle disappearing before you can read it. By using every trick we can and tweaking and fighting for every frame and moment, you can make the experience as transparent as possible for your viewer.

1.) Use subtitles rather than dipping the original audio and replacing with English (or any other language.) Subtitles are a great opportunity to maintain integrity in your film and to gain your audience’s trust. Very often, there will be viewers who speak the original language as well as English. When they see that you are translating correctly, you have gained their trust. When dipping original audio and replacing it with an English speaker, the viewer never knows if it’s a faithful translation and never knows whether to trust the filmmaker or the film. In addition, you are maintaining the emotional power of the speaker. Dropping audio is a technique for radio, not film.

2.) Make sure your translations are correct but also succinct. You must do everything in your power to increase comprehension.

3.) Generally it’s better to break up a speech into more, shorter pieces, than into fewer, longer ones (although not always.)

4.) Keep titles to a maximum of three lines, keep the font size the same. ALWAYS use sans serif fonts.

5.) Always start the titles at the same place (height)

6.) Make line breaks at appropriate places, where they help clarify, ie keep phrases together (this might conflict with #7 below.)

7.) If you can’t keep all lines the same length, make the first line longer than the second and the second longer than the third- it is much easier to read when your eyes don’t have to travel as far to get to the next line. Think inverted pyramid. (This might conflict with #6 above.)

8.) Fade up and down with very short fades (3-5 frames.) It’s jarring and distracting to have the titles pop on, and you don’t have the time for them to fade up slowly.

9.) Have the titles begin and end with the person talking. I know this sounds obvious, but it looks like a mistake when you see titles and there’s no voice. Having said that, sometimes you need to buy a little extra time before and after, but keep it to a second or less.

10.) Don’t leave titles up too long or too short, keep pace with the material.

11.) If you have b-roll shots over the person talking, make sure the subtitles begin right after an incoming shot and end right before the outgoing shot, ie, just after the head and just before the tail. You don’t want to do anything that will take your viewer out of the moment, ie anything that will stop them from suspending disbelief. Again, an obvious rule.

12.) To increase comprehension, minimize b-roll over talking heads. While we’re generally trying to pack in as many images into a film as we can, I’m tending more these days to leave the person talking. The viewer connects much more with the speaker and without changing images the viewer reads and comprehends (“hears”) the content better.

13.) This may seem counter-intuitive, but these days, I am placing subtitles higher in the frame than I used to. Years ago, I always tried to get the titles as low as I could in the frame, to not cover up the image. Now I feel they should be higher, closer to the face. That way, the viewer is more able to connect to the person, it’s a shorter journey to the subject’s eyes and the reading of the titles is more organic.

14.) When shooting, frame the interview to leave room for subtitles, so they don’t touch the face. This means no ECUs if you know there will be subtitles.

15.) Make sure your subtitles aren’t over 100 units IRE, which is possible with most NLEs.

16.) Make sure you show your titles to someone who has no idea what the film or scene is about and see if they can follow them. You have been slaving away on your film for months and know what everyone is saying. See if an innocent bystander gets it. Make sure your viewer understands not only what that person is saying, but its place in the whole story.