Subtitles

My partner and I plan to not only include dialogue, but also captions in our opening. Captioning is essential because we plan to include signing portions in our opening, so this will make it accessible to all people, hearing and deaf. Because of this, we have to do some research on the types of fonts to use for subtitles. There are universal fonts used, and universal colors. For instance, we plan to use yellow captions, like many movies and documentaries do. I went on several websites to find the most commonly used and easy-to-read captions used in film-making. Some websites I used were checksub.com and rev.com, and here are the most popularly-used fonts:

• Arial
• Roboto
• Consolas
• Tiresias
• Helvetica
• Antique-Olive
• Myriad
• Lucida Grande

These fonts are the most easy-to-read and visually appealing fonts I found between the two websites. One thing we want to make imperative is that the subtitles can very easily be read by anyone. This isn't just done by making the font big, but also by focusing on the spacing and overall font type. There are four different ways we can format our subtitles, according to An Expert Guide to Subtitling Rules: 

1. Light-colored text with black outline and drop shadow effect (no black box).
2. Black box fitted around width of text (light-colored)
3. Subtitles in black box touching bottom of screen and extending out to width of screen.
4. Same as #4 except positioned higher up as to not touch bottom of screen.

Right now we plan to do number one because we feel it is more aesthetically pleasing, and the black boxes in the other options seem too visually distracting. But, we have not filmed yet. So, if we are editing and the subtitles don't seem to stand out because of the lightness of the clips, then we will consider the other options. 

Moreover, after considering these fonts, we have narrowed it down to a couple of our favorites that we would be most likely to include in our opening. These are: Arial, Helvetica, Antique-Olive, Myriad (used by Apple), and Consolas (used by Netflix***). Here are example pictures of these fonts from checksub.com, and we plan to try them out in post-production to see which one best fits with our title/credits font and overall scene. 

Arial

Helvetica

Antique-Olive

Myriad

Consolas