The article below is from the Video Ideas email list. This edition looks at creative and original ways to put text on screen.
On-screen text is a big part of internet video — especially on platforms like Facebook where most people watch with the sound off. Yet it’s not uncommon to find filmmakers spending a long time agonising over music (which many won’t hear!) and only adding text as a reluctant afterthought.
I believe that if we’re working on newsfeed videos (like those on Facebook or Twitter) we need to be approaching captions and subtitles with creative ambition. I like to think of this type of video as a return to silent cinema, and just as those films incorporated text into their storytelling from the start, we need to do the same.
To help give you some inspiration, here are seven creative and original ways to put text on screen.
Can I Touch Your Hair? | Cut ⭐ — Illustrated captions
If you have the budget, inviting an illustrator to caption your video can work beautifully. This was for a YouTube video but it work brilliantly on other platforms.
Casey Neistat | YouTube — Imaginative, hand-made titles
There’s a lot I like about Casey Neistat’s early video essays (here’s a selection) but one thing in particular I admire is his low-fi and creative visuals. Too often filmmakers are seduced by slick motion graphics, when what audiences really value is personality and originality.
“Viewsnight” | Newsnight, BBC — Captions animated in ways that reflect the ideas being communicated
These captions for the BBC “Viewsnight” series are imaginative and creative, and don’t require strong tech skills or a big budget. Personally, the delight I get watching these reminds me of rebus puzzles, where a picture represents a word or phrase. (Warning: I lost a good half-hour of my working day clicking through the puzzle page I just linked to.)
Heroes – subtitles placed in a way that echoes comic books
This is clever. Rather than restrict the subtitles to the bottom of the screen, here the producers place them all over the frame in a way that echoes the visuals of comic books. (Thank you Anthony Le for the suggestion.)
A Brief History of John Baldessari | Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman ⭐— A line of script animated as a series of one-word illustrations
There’s a lot I love about this film but here I just want to highlight the way the filmmakers visualise certain lines of script with imaginative titles. The visuals above are for the line, “John Baldessari has been called the grandfather of conceptual art, a master of appropriation, a surrealist for the digital age”. It’s so creative! (Go to 0:27 to watch the original.)
Emphasising key points of the script — especially opening lines and conclusions — is a technique you see a lot from publishers like Vox (e.g. opening of this film about why Victorian mansions are horror icons) and New York Times (e.g. at this point in a film about the New York subway )
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights | Seth Brau – kinetic typography
Kinetic typography can work well, especially when the subject of the film is itself a text — in this case, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s worth noting that there are After Effects plug-ins that can make this kind of work a lot faster than it used to be (Circus Monkey for example). However it will still take time to produce something as well thought-through as the example above.
Perspective | Apple – Using perspective changes to reveal text
So clever! This is obviously a high-budget production, but I reckon there a few tricks here you could steal (sorry, I mean “take inspiration from”) for your filmmaking.
A star (⭐) means particularly recommended. While all the films I include in these emails are worth knowing about for some reason, these are the ones you definitely don’t want to miss watching.