Intertitles - Typography, Sound & Editing // Research

The first ever intertitle was in the short film 'How It Feels to Be Run Over' (1900) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65rGf2swdtU

- In this example the typography was suitable as it looks hand written.
- No sound is heard (since it's a silent film) and it is edited using cuts.

Since then intertitles have progressed a lot being heavily featured in short films as well as trailers. They were incredibly popular in silent films as they were a way to communicate with the audience what the character was saying or thinking.

The typography itself is very important and should be in a style and font that is suitable to what is written. An excellent example of this is from The Cat and the Canary (1927) where the word 'Ghosts!' is displayed. The blue background, and white font with a blue outline are a perfect combination of colours. Blue could be representing the night sky and white is the colour of typical ghosts you would see in older films. The slight movement in this example emphasises the terror someone saying this feels as he or she sees the ghosts.

Intertitles these days in trailers tend to provide the audience with information about the film (marquee names, production companies, quotes from critics, etc.) You can see many examples of this in my previous analyses of trailers.

From analysing all the trailers I have I would broadly say that the main features of typography, sound and editing in terms of intertitles are:

Typography - completely dependent on the genre, always clear to read.

Sound - again dependent on the genre, sometimes intertitles can trigger a change in sound.

Editing - most commonly cut to or faded in and out from, other more complex transitions are used at time, also the amount of time the intertitle is shown for is generally dependent on how much information is shown for the audience to read.