Stephanie Farmer: Midterm Portfolio – #1 Captions

Project Description:

For this video, I wanted to work on the way my humanity leads to ripples in the access tools. Everything technological starts with humans so captions have a human influence on them that is often erased in their robotic format. I also wanted to evoke the exhaustion you sometimes feel as the only disabled person in a room asking for access and inclusion and then being forced to create all the inclusive work yourself. Oftentimes, when you ask for help you only get invited to fix the problem yourself rather than being offered support. Like nothing gets done unless disabled people do it ourselves when we really need allies in high places. Until then, I still work on the access tools and embrace the exhaustion and imperfect nature of captions and audio descriptions and ramps and enlarged text and translations. 

Documentation:

My laptop lies on the ground and is shot from above. The keyboard is covered in strips of paper with different colored handwritten quotes from the video. On the screen is the final scene from the Before Midnight movie which I rewind and then let play and repeat as I struggle to organize the strips of paper in tandem with the dialogue in the video. They are imperfect captions struggling to keep up. I rewind and try again multiple times getting visibly frustrated. Yellow italicized caption notes the sound from the clip as it stops and starts. Blue captions at the top of the video creatively caption what I choose to call the sounds of my thoughts the transcript follows:

[the sound of trying my best] / [and failing] / [and trying again] / [i do this job] / [to help my community] / [which i must do] / [if i want any help myself] / [but im imperfect] / [slower than machines] / [always asking for more time] / [always feeling frozen] / [always trying again] / [but it’s too much] / [but it’s too much] / [but it’s too much] / [but it’s too much] / [i’m sorry] / [i failed] / [but i’ll try again] / [i’ll keep trying again]

PROCESS:

To create this video, I took a clip from a movie of heightened emotions and human feelings, Before Midnight. I hand-wrote all the dialogue of the scene, as well as some creative interpretations and brief sound descriptions. I cut each of them out and then tried to piece them together like a puzzle. I filmed the video without practicing aligning the captions because I wanted to be natural and imperfect. I succeeded in that by genuinely attempting to place the captions down at the time of the line and failing.  When I couldn’t keep up, I would rewind the scene. Then I used auto captions to capture the entire scene accurately so deaf people could also notice my mistakes. Finally, I added a poem of creative captions at the top of the screen. They detailed my feelings in attempting to caption with technological assistance. 

Reflection questions: 

Where do the text and image rub up against each other in your assignment? Where do you find tension or curiosity? 

I think that the entire time the image and the text and the image rubbed up against each other. Because my goal was to show the imperfections of captioning, I succeeded in never accurately capturing the dialogue. Then my creative captions add another layer that complicates the video further taking even more attention away from the original video, which was the point. I wanted so much friction a fire would start. I find that an interesting way of interrogating the functionality of access tools and finding all the things not to do in the face of such rigid rules of the correct way to do things like caption.

How is that theme particularly expressed through the modality of the week? 

It is in all the flaws of these captions that you see the humanity of them. I wanted to break all the rules of captioning choosing to break captions free of the little black rectangle they’ve been stuck in for years. Sometimes that means inaccuracy, but that inaccuracy is a place to grow. Hand-written captions give a more personal experience to make it very clear that they weren’t AI-generated and instead came directly from my fingertips. In the blue superscript captions, I was able to layer in the emotions that were visible in the frustration at my fingertips. Telling the entire story of the captioning process was only possible through the multiple layers of the captions. 

Which elements of the work are beautifully expressed through the modality? Which elements are lost or inexpressible through the modality of the week?

This modality allowed me to tell multiple stories at once. With layered text, the viewer can choose what they want to read. If it were layered voices, you wouldn’t really have that choice as the overlap would make some things inaudible. I think that the ability to tell multiple stories at once is especially possible with text. I do think that struggle and exhaustion are especially palpable through voice. The strain of a speaker really impacts it’s audience. But that wouldn’t be possible given the need to hear the audio of what is being captioned.

Who does this project exclude? Who would not be able to interact with this work? Who is this modality not accessible for?

This video has a lot of layers that make it complex and possibly over-stimulating. I think having the blue captions at the top as a separate companion poem might allow for more clarity. It also isn’t audio described which will be difficult given the spread, the need to hear the characters’ dialogue, and the layers of different captions. In a remix, I would simplify, making space for audio descriptions and incorporating the poem creative into the captions themselves.