Hello Everyone. New Member here. I'm currently working on The Diary of Anne Frank (in English) in Nagoya Japan and we are attempting to subtitle the production for our Japanese audience. We assume a rear projection screen will work but does anyone have any suggestions for low light, legible screens and any suggestions on theatre subtitles in general.
Hey there!, Make a quick post in the New Members Forum and really introduce yourself, we're a nosey bunch and like to to know everything.
For subtitleing a theatrical production we've always gone with "Super Titles". That is we build a screen that hangs over the top of the proscenium and you front project the the script in ,whatever language you want to. We did this for an English version tour of Viet Nam with A Midsummers Night Dream, and we did it for a Vietnamese version for a tour in the United States.
As for the titles themselves we just laid them out in PowerPoint and ran them from that.
i once saw a setup where they had a white flat cut as a rectangle, rigedd infront of the valance, and masked the projector. the projector was rigged in foh catwalks and lets just say keystoneing was fun.
Another way to do it...if you're up for a challenge...is to put the screen BEHIND the audience. Change your projection so that it is reversed.
If someone needs subtitles, you hand them a piece of plexiglass.
They hold it at a basic 45d so it's comfortable. When they watch the show they can glance down at the plex and it is reflecting the subtitles right into their frame of view. Plus, it keeps it away from everyone else's view.
There are actually professional versions of a similar concept that people like Disney use for closed captioning. However, I'm not sure how effective a solution it would be if the subtitles are needed by the majority of the audience. You would also need to look at lighting both how it affects viewing the plexi and whether any other light sources that might be seen in the reflected image.
