Lights Film School Blog

Subtitle Fonts & Sizes

If you’re starting the process of adding subtitles to your film you’ll need to take into consideration font styles, spacing, font color and font size. There are certain fonts that lend themselves well to web design, others that work better in print and others that are optimal for use against dynamic content such as moving images. While web fonts such as Tahoma, Verdana and Georgia are great for use in web media, they were designed to work well in static design environments where the backgr...

Film Fonts

Have you ever wondered what font films use at the end of their trailers, on their movie posters or on the back of the film’s DVD box? The font is generally quite difficult to read, but it outlines who is starring in the film as well as the above the line crew including the Director, Producer, Director of Photography and Production Designer, to name only a few of the positions listed. The font that is used in films is generally seen by audiences as more of a stylistic stamp indicating a professio...

How to Create Film and Documentary Trailers

Creating a trailer for your documentary or film is a great way to expose your story to the world. Essentially a trailer is a short montage of the text, audio and visual components of your film that act as an advertisement for the longer format version. This usually means that the most exciting footage is used in condensed format in the hopes of stimulating audience interest in your film. Everybody’s style, of course, is different and part of the joy of filmmaking is putting your stamp on your...

How to Film a Documentary Interview

Interviewing a documentary subject can be challenging enough. Thinking about technical or editing opportunities while filmmaking can kill the creative spirit of the shoot. However, the technical elements of filming an interview are incredibly important if you want to create a high production look to your documentary. We’ll publish another blog post about how to light a documentary interview, but this blog post will tackle the subject of properly capturing enough “cutaway shots” for editing pu...