Highlighted Text



You've probably Seen It a Million Times -- Alice has received a letter from Bob, or maybe she's just picked up a newspaper with a plot-relevant headline or story. As she reads it the camera switches to her Point of View -- but there's more written on it than we need to read. Fortunately the film has anticipated our needs -- the most important passage is brighter than anything else on the page. This conveniently Highlighted Text draws your eye right to what the scriptwriter wants to you read in the few seconds you have to read it.

When a movie or TV show wants to show you some important written information, and doesn't want you to be distracted by the context in which it is embedded -- or anything else around it, for that matter -- the relevant text becomes brightly lit with everything else on the screen is cast in shadow, often with sharply-delineated edges. In some cases it may be so extreme that it resembles Letterboxing.

This is the non-video Game counterpart to Notice This. It is also the diametric opposite of Censor Shadow. It is frequently seen as a part of Chiaroscuro style. While it's one of the signature tropes of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and is thus strongly associated with it, it continues to be used in both film and other visual media to this day.

Compare Eyedscreen. Compare also Spinning Paper, which is sometimes used in conjunction with this trope.

The polar opposite of Censor Shadow. Contrast If You Can Read This..., which is when text which isn't relevant to the story is readable.

Not to be confused with italics or boldface, often used to emphasize text.

Anime and Manga

 * As the schoolgirls prepare to advance a year in Lucky Star, Yutaka borrows a handkerchief from a girl whose name she didn't learn, who she met at the high school during entrance exams. She plans to return the handkerchief when they both go to see whether they were accepted... until she re-reads the letter from the high school. The animators highlight the essential text: all notifications of acceptances and rejections will be made by mail.

Film

 * Holiday Inn presents the newspaper listings for the Inn's opening night in this manner.
 * In Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps it appears to happen diagetically, as environmental shadows cast on a newspaper bracket a highlight on the headline of a news story.
 * Similarly, in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, when Uncle Charlie sees the headine "WHERE IS THE MERRY WIDOW MURDERER?", it's shown to the moviegoer bright and crisp, with everything else around it fading away into a shadowed blur.
 * Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington uses this device multiple times on various newspaper headlines and articles.
 * Multiple SIDosis highlights the bit of the reel-to-reel recorder's instruction manual which inspires Sid this way.
 * The newspaper article about the beauty queen's drug overdose in Eyes Wide Shut is given a diagonal highlight the first time it appears on screen.

Live-Action TV

 * The PBS genealogy program Finding Your Roots uses this device to emphasize relevant potions of the various historical documents it has uncovered during its searches when displaying to the viewership what host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is presenting to the guests.
 * Done very subtly in some episodes of The Walking Dead. For instance, in "Worth", the penultimate episode of season 8 (broadcast April 8, 2018), Rick looks through his son Carl's letters.  When he stops on one addressed to Negan, there is a faint diagonal highlight over it, running from the upper left corner to the lower right, with "Negan" right in the middle.
 * Netflix's Marvel Cinematic Universe series Luke Cage also does this very subtly when displaying the newspaper articles Misty Knight finds on microfiche in one episode.

Music

 * Within literally the first seconds of the video for Soft Cell's cover of "Tainted Love", a horoscope being read by a young man is highlighted so the viewer knows just what he's in for over the next three minutes.

Western Animation

 * Used in 1944 Tom and Jerry short "The Million Dollar Cat". Tom receives a telegram informing him that he's inherited a million dollars and celebrates wildly, followed by Jerry doing the same. Jerry then shows a confused Tom the second half of the telegram he'd received: Any and all inheritance would cease if Tom brought harm to any living thing, even a mouse - the scene lingers on this text long enough for viewers to read, then focuses the normal brightness around the words "even a mouse" to show that Jerry's about to milk Tom's inheritance for all it's worth.