Design Criteria and Default Aesthetic Subtitles

After all this consideration, we can come up with a list of criteria that will help guide the subtitling process. This is to establish what would be appropriate for the subtitles for Amélie in terms of aesthetic choices and usability for the audience. Having a list of particular criteria to guide the subtitling process will also help the subtitler in creating a sense of consistency and coherence throughout the aesthetic subtitles, and ensure that they remain usable for the established audience. It acts as a self-made translation brief. It is also a good opportunity to look back at existing guidelines to see what principles could still be useful, and integrate them into the aesthetic subtitles. After some deliberation, I have decided on the following criteria for Amélie’s aesthetic subtitles:

1. The subtitles are interlingual subtitles for a hearing audience, who are assumed to be advanced readers due to their age and their exposure to on-screen text.

2. The reading speed of the traditional subtitles will be retained, as there is a speed limit at which an audience can comfortably read a subtitle, simply from human limits. The nature of film as entertainment also implies that a high cognitive effort is to be avoided, and keeping a fairly low reading speed could potentially help keep that effort low.

3. To ensure that the subtitles are coherent with the overall design of the film, they will use a font that is part of its typographic identity.

4. The colours used for the subtitles will be taken from the palette of the whole film or the particular scene being subtitled, whichever is more appropriate.

Again, this will make sure that the subtitles are coherent with the design of the whole film.

5. The bottom of the screen will be considered the default position for the subtitles.

However, they may be moved if needed for greater contrast, better readability, or speaker identification.

6. Subtle animations may be used where appropriate based on emotion and movement of the figures or the setting. An animation will only be used to cue the subtitles in or out. It will not be added to the subtitle once it is on screen.

The aim of these criteria is to establish a default design for all the aesthetic subtitles in Amélie. The default can then be adapted according to the complexity of a scene or its particular stylistic or diegetic needs. Establishing a default will not only ensure the subtitles remain coherent, but it will also make it easier for the audience to become accustomed to patterns in the design. It will also make the subtitling process slightly more efficient, as coming up with a scene-specific design would only require adjusting the default, rather than starting from scratch each time. Moreover, not every subtitle necessarily needs to be customised to a particular shot, especially if doing so does not have any stylistic or diegetic value.

Guideline (3) — that the subtitles should adopt the typographic identity of the film — is specifically inspired from Fox’s comments, mentioned above, that films tend to establish a particular typographic design that contributes to its identity (2016).

Typographic identity has, admittedly, been left out of the modular guidelines so far.

Nevertheless, it is worth analysing to see how it could potentially guide choices for the default aesthetic subtitles for Amélie, especially since the typography has become fairly emblematic of the film. It would be hard to imagine the title written in any font other than the yellow, handwriting-style that has been used (see fig. 13 and 14). As well as the script font, there is a narrow, sans-serif font that nearly always accompanies it (see figs. 13 and 15). The frequency of the two fonts in places such as credit sequences (fig. 14 and 15) and promotional material (fig. 13), both key elements in establishing a

film’s typographic identity, means they are strongly associated with Amélie the film.

So, to ensure a solid coherence between the subtitles and the film, it would be logical to choose one of these two main fonts for the default subtitles.

Let us first consider the script font used in Amélie. Script fonts are already considered especially hard to read for long stretches of text (Ambrose & Harris, 2008). The one used in Amélie appears particularly scruffy, like scribbled handwriting done using a brush pen. When used for text the length of a subtitle (see fig. 16), the lack of legibility means it would be very difficult and tiring to read at speed and tricky to compensate for to make it readable. This quickly disqualifies it as a font choice for the film, as it violates the feature of aesthetic subtitles still being usable.

Figure 13

Figure 15 Figure 14

So, the sans-serif font becomes the most viable option. Looking back at the opening credits of the film (see figs. 15, above, and 17, below), the credits are written in uppercase letters. Given the condensed nature of the characters, as well as the fact that uppercase takes longer to read due to the absence of ascenders and descenders (Ambrose & Harris, 2008), it is very difficult to read, and seems to be an inappropriate choice to use throughout the film. However, when the font reappears in the closing credits (fig. 18), the lower-case versions of the characters are seen. In lower-case, the characters are a lot more legible, with more prominent ascenders and descenders and larger open spaces within the characters (see Jury, 2006).

Figure 16

Figure 18

Figure 17

Looking at a sample subtitle written in the sans-serif font, with sentence capitalisation, it is more legible than the script font, although there is still something to be desired in terms of readability. The characters are so tall and narrow that it is sometimes hard to distinguish between the vertical strokes of adjacent characters — they appear squashed together (fig. 19). However, unlike the script font, this can be easily compensated for by adjusting the spacing between the characters slightly. However, the spacing should not be adjusted too much so it remains subtle and does not break the “tight but not touching” rule (see Jury, 2006) to the point of it becoming detrimental to readability again. Slowly increasing the space between the characters by 0.1 points (pt) at a time, I came to the eventual conclusion that for subtitles in this font, an expanded letterspacing of 0.3pt was the most appropriate, as seen in figure 20.

Once the font was chosen, the second formatting element that needed to be defined for the default subtitles was the colour, as per guideline (4) above. Looking at the various colours used in the palette of the film, I finally settled on red. Red is an accent colour in the film — it is already a bright colour naturally — and stands out particularly well on dark colours and on green, which, as mentioned above, is also a prominent colour in the palette of the film (refer back to fig. 8). I also decided to keep a dark drop shadow for the subtitles, partly to make the subtitles stand out further, and partly to make them appear less flat and a bit more interesting. The shade of red chosen is actually taken from the red used in the opening credit sequence text. This choice helps to make the subtitles coherent with Amélie by adopting another part of the film’s typographic identity. It could even have the benefit of creating the illusion that the subtitles were meant to be part of the film all along, given the close link between their typographic design and that of the film. The only change that was made was to adjust the lightness of it to make it slightly brighter and more visible against the image.

Figure 20 Figure 19

In terms of positioning, I decided that the default would be the traditional position, centred, at the bottom of the image (see figs. 21 and 22). This is partly to conform to the audience’s expectations for where the subtitles will appear — it has been suggested that they will automatically search for the subtitles at the bottom of the screen regardless — but partly because it can make moving the subtitles that much more effective by breaking the audience’s expectations. That said, positioning was the one element I left the most open to being altered, and it was the one I varied the most.

Sometimes, a subtitle was repositioned to resolve a particular issue, such as a lack of contrast or the subtitle covering a key focus point. For example, if a subtitle covers a character’s mouth as they speak, it could be moved to one side so that their mouth can still be seen (see fig. 23 and 24). On many occasions, however, a subtitle was repositioned for more subjective reasons, such as using it as a framing device, moving it closer to a key focus point or indicating the source of a voice, or, as we shall see

below, to represent a particular theme in the film.