The characters on our favorite television programs are just like us: they come home from work and stream their favorite shows and YouTube videos. But I can’t easily recall any television or streaming programs that showed actors using captioned media. While the sounds emantating from their screens may be captioned for us, the sounds are […]
Posts in the Captioning category:
Positioning and styling captions when speakers overlap and interrupt each other
It can be challenging to caption scenes with multiple speakers. Bottom-center caption placement is far from ideal for readers when it fails to clarify which captions belong to which speaker. Adding to the difficulty: speakers often talk quickly, interrupt each other, and overlap their speech to show collaborative support. When captions are placed underneath or […]
Cripping closed captioning: Experiments with type, icons, and dynamic effects
Can we open closed captioning up to greater experimentation through the use of color, icons, typography, and basic animations to convey meaning? Read the full article at DigitalRhetoricCollaborative.org.
Chirp! Captioning BB-8 in The Force Awakens
(Warning: Spoilers throughout.) The release of Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens on DVD and Blu-Ray last week gives us a welcome opportunity to take a much closer look at the closed captions. The BB-8 droid provides an instructive case study. According to the official movie script, the orange and white spherical droid […]
Do sirens always wail?
A recent tweet from @redpawn3 got me thinking about police and ambulance sirens in closed captioning, and specifically how much variety we are likely to find in siren descriptions: To the people who write closed captioning… Is there ever a time the police sirens are going off but not wailing? — Rock God (@redpawn3) December 26, […]
When a yellow subtitle meets a character from The Simpsons
In the RGB color model, pure yellow is created by adding red and green light together at full value (red 255, green 255, blue 0). On Hulu.com, the default color of the closed captions is a warm but bright yellow-gold. This color is created by allowing the red value in the red-green mix to predominate […]
Tracking sonic timelines in closed captioning
Verbs are the heart of nonspeech captions, especially when paralinguistic sounds are involved (grunting, laughing, crying, etc.), because captioning nonspeech is fundamentally about representing and embodying action (which is what verbs do). Note, first, the distinction between discrete and sustained sounds. Nonspeech sounds that have a clear beginning and end are discrete or one-off sounds […]
Closed captions as identity markers (leitmotifs)
When the same nonspeech caption is repeatedly associated with a specific character or recurring context, it comes to serve as a kind of leitmotif for that character or context. In classical music, especially the operas of Richard Wagner, a leitmotif refers to a musical phrase, melody, or flourish that is associated with a specific character […]
Subtitles as visual art
Subtitles in foreign language films don’t have to be visually boring, uninspiring, or ugly. But too often, that’s exactly what they are. Legible, maybe, but still visually dull and lifeless. Standard subs are rarely well integrated into a film’s visual aesthetic. Alice Rawsthorn (2007) puts it bluntly in her critique of the standard subtitle: Subtitles […]