A Quick Guide to Showing Text Messages on Screen

Text messages are increasingly becoming the main channel of communication between people.

As such, they are part of the movies and TV shows, which adds a difficulty of showing the content of the exchange.

One way to do this is to actually show the phone screen, which is similar to the way e-mail is often shown.

Placing bubbles with the message content next to the character is another popular workaround the issue.

Using subtitles is the more conventional, old-school method that works great for certain genres.

Key Takeaways:

Two popular ways to show text on screen, in a video or film, are just to shoot the message in the phone, or have the character read the message aloud.
Displaying the message on the screen, in an unfiltered and plain mode is just another method, although it gets complicated when the film is in another language.
Writing the text as a subtitle is a simple way to show text on the screen, and it can be translated when the film is in another language, but this method can be seen as a low production quality.

“One common work-around is to take the text and put it next to the character, so that the messages appear in bubbles beside their head or body.”

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