Rebekah Lee: Midterm Portfolio – #3 Creative Captions

The Project

Project Description 

I had to choose a film from 3 films and caption a five-minute segment of my choosing. I got to experiment with creative captions to add meaning, mix it up, and/or comment on the original video. We learned about kinetic typography, editing, and other creative means.

Documentation 

The first decision I made was choosing “Cindy goes to a party” because I thought the fairy godmother concept was super fun and the video already had text graphics in it. I chose the last five minutes of the video because there were so many “dings” and I thought it’d be fun to edit.

I chose to separate the captions using location and color. I wanted to move around the captions and assign a color to each character, so chose pink for Cindy, blue for Dennis, yellow for Mary, white for Fairy Godmother, and other colors for other characters.

Then I wondered how to make Fairy Godmother’s captions stand out, because she’s different from the other child characters. I decided to use text graphics with very little effects like kinetic type. Some phrases that she would say would be displayed with an ethereal font and flashed on the screen to emphasize the difference of this character.

It was fun to experiment with the location and timing of these graphics, and it wasn’t too hard as I didn’t use this method for every word she said.

I tried my best with describing sounds and music. Since I knew I wasn’t restrained by objectivity, I decided to let myself go and write anything. Here, I wrote that the song that was playing reminded me of the chicken dance song. I don’t think everyone knows how it goes, especially d/Deaf people, but I wanted to add my own voice into the captions so I included my thoughts.

After Cindy wakes up from her dream, the font changes and has no color. I wanted to contrast the fun dream to reality, so I removed all color. The placement still follows all the characters, to make it easier to know who is speaking.

I wanted to do more with the ending music, so I used squares to indicate when a note was being played at the end. I didn’t do it for every note of the outro song, but as it was crescendoing, I wanted to show that visually. I’m not sure if it helps at all to be honest, but I had fun timing it on the screen.

What didn’t work or what was hard was that sometimes I didn’t know which child was speaking, or what someone was saying at all. I wanted to include everyone’s comment in this scene but could not and instead generically said that all the children agreed in brackets.

Reflection Questions

What is the theme of the work?

• The theme of the work is that captions are seen by everyone differently. I think we’ve been looking at a lot of examples of creative captions, but ultimately, people have differing opinions about them. Some people think they’re distracting, too subjective, too objective, or absolutely necessary, etc. This work specifically explores how I would caption a video with all freedom, and I realize that making creative captions can be something really fun and REALLY complicated if you wanted it to be.

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

• Creative captions can look like anything, so the modality shows how everyone creates differently and interprets these captions differently. My captioned video will 100% be different from someone else’s, which is what makes this modality a form of art.

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

• I think the interpretation of the artist is greatly expressed through the modality, as you can see how the artist took the video and audio (or lack of) and created visuals with it. How they think about and take dialogue, sounds, music, etc, is very clearly seen through captions with the words they choose, the graphics they choose, animations, and the like.

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

• Depending on who is making creative captions, anything could be lost like objectivity or subjectivity. The artist could be too objective and not provide any creative thought, or be too subjective that the captions don’t relate to the video at all. The modality is so diverse that it’s completely subjective for each person.

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

• This project excludes blind people who cannot see the video nor the captions. They can hear everything though. But they would not be able to see the artists intentions and interpretations of the video and/or audio.

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).

• You could speak each creative caption that is different from what is said in the video so that blind people can hear what the artist does with the video or what their intentions were. Basically making audio descriptions for the creative captions themselves.

Additional Modality (if applicable) 

What modality did you apply? 

How did you decide on this modality?

What does the beholder gain from this additional modality? Why? 

Does the beholder lose anything from this modality? What? 

Show documentation of this modality, and describe it if it’s not accessible on a screen (ie, if it’s tactile if it’s a scent)