The characters on our favorite television programs are just like us: they come home from work and stream their favorite TV shows and YouTube videos. But it’s hard for me to recall any programs that showed actors using captioned media. While the sounds emantating from their screens may be captioned for us, the sounds are not captioned for them.
Continue reading “Caption every screen.”Category: Visual Design
Positioning and styling captions when speakers overlap and interrupt each other
![A profile shot of Gweneth Paltrow in Contagion (2011). The on-screen text, Day 2, is partially covered by the closed captions: [Coughs] [Cell phone rings]](https://seanzdenek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Contagion-Header-1080x601-1.jpg)
It can be challenging to caption scenes with multiple speakers. Bottom-center caption placement is far from ideal for readers when it fails to clarify which captions belong to which speaker. Adding to the difficulty: speakers often talk quickly, interrupt each other, and overlap their speech to show collaborative support. When captions are placed underneath or next to each speaker, readers can more quickly distinguish — at a glance — who is speaking.
Continue reading “Positioning and styling captions when speakers overlap and interrupt each other”Published: Designing Captions — A new article on enhanced captioning
Check out my new article on enhanced captioning, just published in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedaogogy (23.1, 2018).
Read the full article: “Designing captions: Disruptive experiments with typography, color, icons, and effects.”
Cripping closed captioning: Experiments with type, icons, and dynamic effects
Can we open closed captioning up to greater experimentation through the use of color, icons, typography, and basic animations to convey meaning?
Read the full article at DigitalRhetoricCollaborative.org.
When a yellow subtitle meets a character from The Simpsons
A comparison of the default yellow closed captions on Hulu.com with the yellow skin color of the animated characters on The Simpsons.
Read the full post on ReadingSounds.net.
Subtitles as visual art
Subtitles in foreign language films don’t have to be visually boring, uninspiring, or ugly. But too often, that’s exactly what they are. An analysis of the English subtitles in Night Watch.
Read the full post on ReadingSounds.net.
“Subtitles I like to ride on”: When medium awareness extends to subtitles
When fictional characters break through the fourth wall to comment on the subtitles…
Continue reading ““Subtitles I like to ride on”: When medium awareness extends to subtitles”
Genre-defining sounds, even when they lie to us
Even when music is intended to deceive, it needs to be captioned if it’s instrumental to the genre.
Continue reading “Genre-defining sounds, even when they lie to us”
Iambic pentameter captions?
Should poems and other quoted material be captioned as they were originally written?