Devynne Best: Midterm Portfolio – #3 Creative Captions

The Project

Project Description 

For this project, I had to choose an old found footage video to add captions. The captions were added to make the video more accessible for those who are Deaf or hard of hearing. Another focus of this project was to not treat these captions like an afterthought, and to add some creative aspects to the captions to make them more important and integrated within the narrative of the video.

Documentation 

I first decided which found footage video to create captions for. I decided on the one titled “The Relaxed Wife.” I was interested in using this video because of the way audio was used throughout the video to move the story along. I thought it would be interesting to try to creatively apply captions to this and capture the way audio is used through them. 

When making this, I first focused on working on making the autogenerated captions accurate to the dialogue of the video. I did his because I feel like that, first and foremost, is the most important aspect of this project. I developed these then will add creative captions to supplement them, so even though it may not be the most accessible the standard ones would still be there.

I then had some ideas about how to add the creativity with the captions after, like creating dynamic captions. I looked up a youtube tutorial about how to create motion captions but it was a little difficult to learn and also I figured that it might not be the most accessible to read as well so I decided on something different.

This was a first iteration of the creative captioning, but after the motion issue and also the aesthetic of it, I felt like it wouldn’t work looking like that.

Here is one screenshot of how I decided to add the creative captioning, I mostly focused on describing the noises that were being individually made within the piece, because I felt like that rhythm was important to visualize for the piece. 

I also had a setback during the process of finishing the project. I had been working on it gradually for a few days and just left the file constantly open on my laptop, as I was almost finished my Premiere Pro crashed and all the work I had been doing over those days had deleted and I had to restart implementing the creative captions. One thing to take away from that is to remember to save and not overwork my laptop.

 

Reflection Questions

The theme of this work is adding a new and creative twist to an old and arguably outdated piece of media.

This theme is expressed through the use of creative captioning, added to the video post production. The goal of the captioning is to not only add a layer of accessibility that the original piece but to also add to the content of the video in itself. When learning about captioning, I learned that focusing on integrating them into a project from conception is the best practice to create the most accessible final product without having to compromise on the story or accessibility.

I that think adding the captions added to the whimsical feel of the piece, making not only the words of the piece but also the feeling of the piece accessible to the viewers who need captioning.

Some things that I feel could still be lost with this modality is tone, because though stylistic choices can help with the overall feel of the piece, it’s still hard to convey the exact tone of each spoken part of the work or the music, which i feel is hard to explain simple enough for captioning.

This modality may exclude people who maybe have cognitive issues and cannot read the captions fast enough or even at all. Something I also was considering with the colored captions indicating the speaker, if someone is color blind then they might not be able to distinguish the different colors. Although, I still have them labeled by name of the character as well, so i dont think it will be too debilitating. Someone else that this might exclude is a person who is blind, so now they are missing out on some of the added content from the captioning. 

I was thinking about adding tone indicators to the captions of speech within the video to address the loss in tone, but I don’t think they are universally used, and may be just confusing. 

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)