How to Caption Your Film

Captions are a text version of the spoken words and other audio elements of a film. Not only do they make movies accessible to those who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, they also help others who struggle to understand the speakers. 

This tutorial will show you how to add captions to your film manually using iMovie!
Captioning your film should be the last thing you do before you submit your film! If you try to caption your film before while you’re editing, it will make editing the rest of your film much harder, so try to edit the film once you’re completely done with editing the video.

Get Started

To start, you’re going to need to open iMovie and import your movie. Then tap the clip you would like to add text to.

Now, scroll down the timeline and tap the point in the movie where you would like to add captions. 

After that, five buttons should appear at the bottom of the screen.

Click on the Titles button to add text. There you can choose the style of the caption and where you want it to appear in your movie. Most captions appear at the bottom of the screen, so it is easier to read the captions while watching the content of the movie at the same time.

Tap on the text box on the screen and the keyboard will pop up. Start typing the text of your caption. Tap Done when finished. 

To end the caption, scroll down the timeline and tap on the Scissors button. Then, tap on the Split button. Notice that the caption ends where you tapped the Split button.

To add more captions, scroll and select the clip you would like to add captions to. Select the Scissors icon and tap the place where you’d like the new caption to end. Tap on the Split button.

Now, tap on the Titles button and add more text.  Keep doing this until your whole film is captioned!