This weekend is a film fest here, and I’m using it as an opportunity to see foreign movies to complete my quest of seeing one movie from every country in the world…which brings me to
Please, no more white subtitles! I saw a movie thursday night from Denmark, and friday night from Burkina Faso, and both used white subtitles. Needless to say I could only catch about 2/3 of what was being written. Don’t these people look at what it looks like with white subtitles?? Luckily neither took place with snow scenes.
I suppose they use white because it looks nicer than yellow. Yea, true, but when you can only read half of what is being said, don’t you think that takes away more from the story than yellow writing along the bottom? I want to read as fast as possible, so I can concentrate on the acting and voices. yellow over black is the best.
Today I’m seeing a Romanian and one from Palestine I think. Please…yellow!
Good call. I would think it would be a real no-brainer to ensure that the subtitles are readable but it seems to be routine to make them the same colour as the background.
My favorite “white subtitle” film was, I think, a Fellini film. It was about some sort of circus dude. Without recapping the film, let must just say that the conclusion of whatever happened was not shown, but narrated… which was just subtitled. In white. In front of images of a woman who is drying out billowing white sheets. Ug.
Subtitles come in quite useful when you’re sharing space with a screaming neice, or nephew, or someone who sees fit to vacuum when I’m trying to watch a movie.
Nightwatch has excellent subtitles in it. Whomever did them deserves an Oscar, totally unobtrusive, easily readable, and they also adapted themselves to the storyline in creative manners. When a vampire is talking, for example, they’re blood red, and melt.
Oooo, I’m with the OP. I watch foreign films constantly, tho never have undertaken such a grand endeavor! But I do watch a lot of Chinese, Japanese, and Hindi flicks, and I love my subtitles even when I can speak the language.
But one of them did show up much better, Death of Mr Lazarescu, I think because they were nice and thick. Course this time it didn’t really help me since 1 minute before the show started the tallest guy in Madison comes up, and plunks down front and center, right in front of me in the sunken 2nd row. Thanks guy. I spent 153 minutes moving my head left and right to read what was happening. Then they guy directly behind me starts eating popcorn all thru the show. But popcorn eaters are for another thread.
Worst use of subtitles ever was in It’s Pat. Just when the Japanese guy was revealing Pat’s gender, some idiot walked in front of the subtitles. Now how am I supposed to know Pat’s gender?
Dear OP: I hear you! Just because Spike Lee makes a movie where the characters speak in black street vernacular doesn’t mean you have to provide subtitles!
I turned off two movies this weekend because the subtitles were so lousy. One of them was in orange, but they were so small that you couldn’t read them. I’m sure it was ok on the big screen but these people need to remember that movies go to DVD and you can’t be watching with a magnifying glass!
Usually, difficult-to-read white subtitles are a result of technical limitations. They can be easily made during the transfer from the negative by just overlaying a transparency with black text that results in unexposed (white) text on the transfer.
If you want anything more legible, you need a more elaborate process. If you want yellow subtitles, for example, you have to matte the text area so it doesn’t get exposed to the image, and prepare an inverse matte that exposes the text area but nothing else and then run it through again and expose it with a blue light.
Why? Because the vampires in it aren’t whiney little brats who go around biting people on the neck and then agonize about it for hours afterwards? Personally, I prefer vampires who like being vampires, be they gay or straight.
You know what I hate about this thread? Everytime I see it on the forum page, I get Nazareth’s My White Bicycle stuck in my head.
*I pit white subtitles, I pit white subtitles
Sitting in my theatre seat
For a foreign cinema treat
My eyes are tired and I can’t see straight
Reading those really makes me irate
I pit white subtitles, I pit white subtitles*
(Actually, I hear Neil from The Young Ones singing it.)
[QUOTE=Larry Mudd]
Usually, difficult-to-read white subtitles are a result of technical limitations. They can be easily made during the transfer from the negative by just overlaying a transparency with black text that results in unexposed (white) text on the transfer.
[QUOTE]
God point. But this can be fixed by adding, along with the black print on the transparency, a “grey” (actually a screen of black dots) background strip, at no extra expense.
