Subtitles of the Movie

This lesson, working with text, brought to you by the letter B. Alright. Let's go ahead and start working with text. Now, to do so we have to have a menu, which is handy, of course, because you want something to type in. So if you don't have a menu, just go to the Menu Menu, which sounds kind of interesting, and choose New Menu. Likewise, if you want a completely blank slate, what you can do is go down to your Library, choose something like General and choose a blank guy like this one, Blank Menu and then double click on it. Now I'm going to just slide this down again so we can focus on characters. To type text, I'm going to then click on one of these two tools here; the Text Tool or the Vertical Text Tool. Let's go ahead and grab this guy and I'm going to show you two ways to create type. The first way is to click one time until you see the blinking I-beam. Now you can start typing. We'll Undo that and show you something else. Let's say that there's a specific region that you want to focus on, like just here. What, you can take this tool and click and drag like so to create a bounding box. Now your type is going to stay in here and you don't have to worry about hitting the Return Key or anything like that because it's going to wrap automatically for you. So I can start typing stuff like; so I have stuff in this box. It's awesome. And I can click and drag with the Type Tool to select this text. I can click here on a color swatch, change the color. I can change the size. I can also, as I mentioned before, change the letting. So if this is 24, I'll make this, well, I can type my own value so I want 26 so I can have a nice readability here. And I can also increase the size by clicking here as well. So I'll type 50 and hit Return on my keyboard. Now, in the last lesson, I did speak about how you want the size of the letting to be about two points bigger than the actual font size and now you see what I'm talking about. With a font size of 50 and the letting at 26, it's very compressed. So I can go here now and type 52 and now we have a lot more room. Now, also, don't forget. That's only a general rule of thumb. You can experiment with this and see what works for you. So 50 might look good, 48 might look good. It depends on the font you're working with and the message you're trying to convey. An example: let's say you're doing an underwater DVD, like Titanic 2, the Return. The fonts might have a very claustrophobic feel to them so that we're under water and it's kind of scary. So then I would probably take that and indeed do something just like that for the menus so we have this disturbing feel to it where it's not quite comfortable. So text is just as important to your design as your images and as your video and it's something a lot of people take for granted. Type is a graphic. It's artwork and it could really help you convey your message. And the color is important too. So once again, you're doing something like Titanic; nice rich blue like this. I'll go ahead and deselect it by clicking on the Selection Tool and you have something down here that you can then move around with the Direct Selection Tool, move it down here, rotate it a little bit and then you can do all kinds of cool stuff to this text and you can have, you know, it all on the bottom like the ship itself. So you may have a big silhouette of the ship and have a couple of menu items down here that are really compressed like this, like the ship has been compressed by all the weight of the water. So keep that in mind as well. Another thing you might want to do is make is rust colored because there's a lot of rust down there on the ship. So all kinds of cool things you can do to type. Now let's talk about the vertical scale. So I'm going to just grab this and put it back the way it was. Let me move this over a little bit. You also have something called the Vertical and Horizontal Scale. So we can click in this field and let's say I want to make this 200 percent. It stretches the type and it gives you a really, really claustrophobic feel. Likewise, you have the Horizontal Scale, which I can enter a value such as 400 and stretch that text out. I'll just grab the handles and show you what we have here. Once again, something that can be useful for a background or, you know, something that can be very disturbing. I can experiment with these numbers by simply clicking in these fields and entering a value. So it could be 50 here and I could put, you know, whatever I want as well. So I can put that at 50 and just play around with that until I'm happy. So hopefully this is helping you understand some of the cool things you can do. You can also, of course, grab the tool again and click on any of the words inside of this box and use any of these tools like the Strikethrough and Underline and once again, deselect it and see what you have. Just experiment with it and the rule of thumb once again is to keep in mind that this is not just something that's in your interface. It's also a part of the design and you'll find all these options in the Character Panel located under the Window Menu if you don't see it.