Captioned irony: How captions manipulate narrative time and viewers’ knowledge

Inspired by the notion of dramatic irony, I begin to explore in this video what I call “captioned irony.”

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If it weren’t for Speaker IDs, I’d have no idea what’s going on

An analysis of one scene from Moon (2009) starring Sam Rockwell. The scene’s captions make use of Speaker IDs to identify speakers who are off-screen. But in doing so, the Speaker IDs fill in a major piece of the narrative puzzle.

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Overcaptioning: Which sounds are significant?

Which sounds are significant? How does the captioner choose which sounds to caption? Are some captions unnecessary? Why isn’t it possible to caption every sound in the environment?

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If movie characters could read closed captions, they’d glimpse the future

Caption readers sometimes know what’s happening before the characters themselves. In this way, captions tell the future.

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