[Owen Caldwell]: Midterm Portfolio – #3 Creative Captions

The Project

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

I tastefully and carefully captioned a 5 minutes of found footage using various industry captioning guidelines.

DOCUMENTATION

When we first started learning about captions, I was immediately perplexed by the emphasis on having an opaque rectangular background. I had seen very readable captions in the past, and I was relieved when we got to the part of the class that talked about Stranger Things captioning, because not only were the captions themselves well-written but Netflix’s captions settings, I find, are readable and elegant. So for my caption project I wanted to try to copy Netflix’s style and standards for their captions.

I started by researching their proprietary font, Netflix Sans, which was designed by typeface studio in the United Kingdom called Dalton Maag.

Here’s how that type looks on Stranger Things:

So the goal was to achieve this look. I started by installing a (frankly pirated) version Netflix Sans and adjusting the font sizing, line height, and caption width to match how captions look in Stranger Things. Here is the final result of that:

This is as far as my aesthetic considerations went unfortunately. In hind sight there are areas where I wish I’d gone further. The music throughout this piece, for example, is hard to capture with text alone, and a visualizer off to the side would have fit well.

The Stranger Things caption style is minimal but effective. They introduce name tags [Example] only when absolutely necessary, and when a new speaker starts talking, their line is denoted only with a “-”. Ex:

I made sure to incorporate these rules, but I adjusted others to my liking. For one, I made the captions a bit larger (you may compare the first frame in the document with the one above), and I chose to left-align the captions which I find looks nicer and was recommendation from the DCMP Caption Key.

The piece switches between two main subjects: the Narrator and the Operators on screen. Since these were the only two major forces of dialogue, but the narrator was never shown on screen, I always made sure to announce the switch with a name tag [Operator] (see above) and [Narrator]. In addition, the Narrator’s dialogue is italicized, and I’m hoping that this would help signal that the person speaking is off-screen. As for denoting individual operators, I never saw a need to identify them specifically, and each individual regularly spoke on-screen, so I thought just using Netflix’s dash “-” system was enough to distinguish different speakers.

I made fairly undescriptive captions for sounds:

Again, I wish I had done more justice to the musical backdrop of this piece. The computer synths, the beeps and buzzes in rhythm are so abstract that I had a hard time adding any detailed captions for them. The best I could do was mark where these tones began, crescendoed, changed, and ended— at least that provides a rough map of where the music is used.

Reflection Questions

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

The piece titled “Incredible Machine” is about advancements in computer technology and the possibilities for computer applications in engineering and design fields. Despite praise of these new computer technologies for “the advancement of humanity” and tremendous increase in productivity and the promise of ease-of-living for everyone, not much was done at this time, at Bell Labs or elsewhere in the 1960s, to accommodate disabled audiences. It wasn’t until the 21st century, 40 years or so later, that technologies like Premiere, word processors, web applications, started integrating accessibility features.

• Which elements of the work are beautifully/wonderfully/perfectly expressed through the modality?

I think the dialogue was captured really well in a text format through this modality. There is a clear distinction between when the narrator is speaking and when any of the several operators are speaking. One moment I particularly enjoyed making and I think came out really well was when an operator was synthesizing the word “Nice.” I thought of a way of easily capturing the staccato tones of the robot with emphasis on the O in NOICE, and then turning the O in to a 0 when the operator dropped the tone an octave.

• Which elements are lost or inexpressible through the modality of the week?

This piece is surprisingly musical! I should have implemented a visual system throughout the piece that communicated how the music felt— but I’m lazy and I didn’t, so those pesky musical notes are all we’ve got for discerning when the music cues in and when an important moment is emphasized by the music. I placed a “music crescendos” somewhere, and a “tones fade” to let the audience know when the music ended, but I really couldn’t find a decent way to textually describe such abstract musical work.

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

People with no vision or partial vision would not be supplied adequately through this project. Though there are certainly audio components and the narrations are very descriptive, an additional visual translation is needed for certain audiences to understand everything thats going on in the piece.

• Now that you’ve identified who is excluded, what is one way you could remix this piece to include another population? (You don’t have to make this part, but think about it and write about it).

As we will do in the next project, Audio Description is a solution that can simultaneously include deaf and visually-impaired audiences. Audio description is an added-on audio modality that describes the visuals on screen in words. Audio Description is packaged with videos on a separate audio track that can be activated for visually-impaired audiences. For the following project, I will write a script for each visual action or setting and record my voice at each time stamp whenever necessary.