This article was written in 2019. It might or it might not be outdated. And it could be that the layout breaks. If that’s the case please let me know.

Emotion in closed captions

In a few weeks time I will teach a new three week course called Responsive Typography. In this course my students will give emotion to closed captions. The idea came from a conversation I had with Marie van Driessche. She explained that she needs closed captions to understand movies, like all Deaf people do, but that many fine details in the audio track are lost. The neutral sans serif, and the neutral descriptions of sounds doesn’t cover the complete experience. So I will ask my students to create a typographic experience of a film scene that’s more complete.

I can use your help.

I am looking for a few film scenes where audio plays an important part, where neutral text closed captions don’t do it justice. Of course the famous Pulp Fiction scene where Samuel L. Jackson quotes from the bible immediately pops to mind. But I’d like to give them more choice. And I’m sure there are more subtle and more complicated examples out there.

So if you know such a scene, let me know, preferably with a link to the scene on Youtube. Comments are open, but you can ping me on Twitter as well if you want to.