Teresa Garratty: How captions can get creative

Captions/subtitles are something most of us here are used to and something we couldn’t do without.

Part of my job as a film-maker means I spend a lot of time captioning/subtitling video footage to make it more accessible. It’s quite a laborious task as it requires a lot of focus on spelling and grammar but it’s still a very important one.

As I work alongside a lot of Deaf professionals, we like to experiment creatively when it comes to captions. Access is an important part of our videos but that doesn’t mean captions can’t contribute artistically too.

At the moment, creative captions are more common in dance or sign song music videos. For example, I’ve worked on numerous projects with Deaf Dancer Chris Fonseca, sometimes for his dance videos and sometimes for his live performances.

He likes to have the lyrics present on screen but in a way that matches the song he’s dancing to. So I animate the lyrics to appear on screen at the same time they’re sung/rapped or to the beat of the track. The text follows the rhythm of the performance and isn’t just an accessible commodity, it’s another tool that adds to the musicality of the piece.

The same applies to Sign Song videos. Most recently, I collaborated with Rebecca Withey on a music video that featured her own original sign song.

She wanted the lyrics to be accessible to non BSL users too but to also be special in their own right. The song is a very emotionally sensitive piece, so we decided that the captions should reflect that too. It may seem like a small detail but can often emphasis the feelings you’re trying to communicate.

I’ve now also moved into creative captioning for Theatre. It’s fairly new territory for a lot of theatre companies, so there are no hard and fast rules for what is right and what is wrong. The show in question is Charlene James’ “Cuttin It”, directed by Nickie Miles-Wildin and featuring Deaf actress Hermi Berhane.

As with all theatre scripts, it’s extremely dialogue heavy, which meant it would be a huge effort caption wise. From the start, we decided to assign a creative font for each character to reflect their personalities and what their hand writing might look like.

This sounds simple but was a tricky decision as we had to find a middle ground between realistic written font but one that was also legible. Caption wise, it’s a fine line between access and creativity and there were times when we wondered if we pushed the boundary too far. After all, creative captions are great but not if you can’t actually read them.

To make sure we weren’t going OTT, we asked several people who sat in rehearsal and previews for feedback which was mostly positive, so we stuck to our creative guns.

Another aspect of creative captioning gives you the ability to play with the background the text overlays. For “Cuttin’ It” We used this opportunity to cement the locations mentioned in the script. Wallpaper or cracked paint for the characters houses, maths books and canteen whiteboards for the school. There were lighting changes and sound effects to help convey a location change, so why not make the captions part of that too?

There are so many semiotic elements to theatre from set design to costume and make up. All carefully thought out to match the overall tone and style of the piece and with the technology at hand today, there’s no reason why captions can’t be used in the same artistic manner.

I had a chat with the director after press night about the possible future of creative captioning and we both agreed that (time and budget allowing) it can be taken a lot further in terms of animation, placement in the set etc so we’re both very excited to see where that will lead. We also briefly touched upon how balance is a key factor. Creative captions have to be visually interesting, accessible and not detract from the action on stage.

If the audience feedback so far is anything to go by, we’ve done a decent job so far. Some Deaf audience members were sceptical of the scrawly font choices at first but then did realise this helped to connect the captions to a character and made the accessibility more engaging.

Others who have found standard captioning boring to read in the past said they found the creative captions held their attention more and made the theatre-going experience more pleasant in general. I think that’s an important issue to note when it comes to accessibility.

There’s something about a formal text box shoved to the side of the stage, only on specific dates that almost screams “You’re not really welcome here” but when the captions have been artistically integrated into the show for all to see, for every single performance it sends a message of inclusivity. We want you here and we want you to enjoy being here just as much as anyone else.

“Cuttin’ It” is currently running until the 2^nd Feb at the Royal Exchange in Manchester if you’d like to try creative captioning for yourself. What we’ve done may not be everyone’s cup of tea but it’s definitely something to build upon in the future.

 

Read more of Teresa’s posts (with cartoons!) by clicking here.

Teresa is a freelance film maker, photographer and full time cynic. At school, she was voted “Most likely to end up in a lunatic asylum”, a fate which has thus far been avoided. Her pet hates are telephones, intercoms and all living things. Follow her on Twitter as @TGarratty