Side by Side

Subtitles that don't distract from the drama — timely, easy to read, and technically flawless.

In 2025, I organized an offline screening of Mette Aakerholm‘s film, but a live online Q&A session with her turned out to be impossible.

So I decided to pre-record a short interview to serve as a bridge and kick off the discussion among the audience.

• I prepared questions based on the audience's emerging interests in the film's themes.

• We had a one-hour video conference with voice separate recording and screen recording.

• I transcribed the English audio, translated it into Latvian and Russian, and created subtitles in both languages.

• As a result, a 13-minute video was shown at the screening.

• After the screening, we turned this spontaneous interview into the film festival's podcast episode:

While preparing for the next film screening, I downloaded a movie catalog in PDF format from the film festival’s website.

The source file was provided to me in Figma. It turned out that the “shredder effect” was caused by the export algorithm, resulting in an oversized file.

So I manually transferred the source file to InDesign and, in the process, discovered a few more inaccuracies that had occurred during several rounds of editing:

• Identical page numbers on pages 11, 25, 32, and 34.

• Broken external links or links leading to the wrong destination.

• Inconsistencies in text styles — different parameters in styles that are intended to be uniform.

• Inconsistencies in the placement, colors, and sizes of elements — when viewing the PDF page by page, it seems as though some elements are “jumping”.

• Some movies do not fit on a single page — by just a tiny bit, even though there seems to be enough space.

• Photos are not optimized — some have too high or too low resolution, or need color correction.

• Everything that can be labeled has been labeled: in English and unambiguously — layers, styles, colors, linked file names, etc.

• Everything that can be automated has been automated: page numbering, table of contents, navigation, style settings, link colors, master pages, etc.

• All linked images have been optimized for color correction, appropriate resolution, and compression for online sharing.

• One film — one page: I adjusted the layout rules so that all films fit entirely on a single page and the eye doesn't “jump” around. One film still didn't fit — the description was too long and there were too many awards — but now we have a template for designing the next film like this.

• As a result, the catalog became shorter — from 47 pages to 44.

• File size decreased alomost tenfold — from 31.99 to 3.77 MB.

• No errors — the text has been proofread, navigation works, and external links have been checked.

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