This Open Caption Technology Creates a Better Experience for Both Hearing Impaired and Hearing Audiences
Zeinabu irene Davis’ “Compensation” premiered at film festivals 25 years ago, but only now is it receiving theatrical distribution from Janus Films. Its big-screen debut comes in tandem with its restoration, which Davis calls a “rejuvenation.” As she told the IndieWire Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, the process improved the film: A 4K scan brought out details from 16mm negative, while the 5.1 surround track unlocked layered sound design that was “squashed” in its original mono track.
But for Davis, the biggest improvement stemmed from what open-caption technology now makes possible. “The captions, that was the godsend,” said Davis. “Because back in ’99, we were only limited to two lines of dialogue, two lines of captioning, 31 characters max. You had to condense, even the dialogue, you had to condense it so it would fit, and it had to be at the bottom center of the screen.”
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“Compensation” contains two parallel stories, one at the beginning of the 20th century and one at its end. Each is about a deaf Black woman (actress Michelle A. Banks plays both) and what it means to fall in love with a man (actor John Earl Jelks plays both) who is not deaf, and doesn’t know American Sign Language (ASL). Members of Chicago’s ASL community were key to its production, in front of and behind the camera.
For a film that is about communication and the deaf community, Davis adapted the cinematic language of early silent film. This included old-fashioned intertitles as well as captions. With new open caption technology, Davis worked with hard of hearing filmmaker Alison O’Daniel (“The Tuba Thieves”) to create all-new captions that opened up the film to a new world of storytelling possibilities. “[O’Daniel ] helped us really create the tableau of the scene to include captionings in strategic parts of the frame,” said Davis.
With the ability to use the entire frame and work captions into the composition, O’Daniel and Davis placed music descriptions in the upper left-hand corner of the frame, sound effect descriptions in the upper right-hand corner, and altered positioning of the dialogue. “Alison taught us as a team that we should put the captioning closer to the person who’s speaking, if it’s a multiple character scene, so the deaf and hard of hearing know who is actually speaking,” said Davis.
This made an enormous improvement for “Compensation,” which often lives in wide shots and uses very few close-ups. In the scene in the photo below, Malindy (Banks) talks with other women in a wide shot. The dialogue placed near the character makes clear who is talking and helps clarify what is happening in the scene.
The “Compensation” restoration also used captions in expressionistic ways. During a modern-day scene, there’s a sequence Davis refers to as “the depression montage.” It utilizes an optical printer, Eisenstein-inspired editing, and an expressionistic use of sound design to create an almost underwater effect made even more pronounced with the restoration’s multichannel surround mix. Davis and O’Daniel matched this formal playfulness with their approach to new captions for this scene.
“We did some immersive stuff with the captioning,” said Davis. “Making words large, capitalized, making them go backwards and forwards, making them pop out and glow a little bit. We’re able to use the technology to make you feel what the characters are going through emotionally.”
With a film that attracts deaf and hard of hearing audiences, O’Daniel and Davis focused on captions that would make the film more immersive and easier to follow. In the process, Davis also discovered a real benefit for the hearing audience by calling attention not only to the use of sound but also the layers of communication.
“It also helps hearing people to actually pay more attention: ‘Oh, these sounds are here. I wasn’t thinking about that, or I didn’t hear that part of that music before. I didn’t think about the music in quite that way,’” said Davis.
“It was a really difficult process to decide — there’s a lot of text in ‘Compensation’ already because you have to read title cards that were in the style [of] silent cinema,” she said. “But we also want to make sure that the language wasn’t too burdensome — people being like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to watch this film because I don’t want to read anymore.’ But the marriage of using the captioning on screen and the intertitles really worked. And I think it makes you have a more immersive experience watching the film now, regardless of whether you’re hearing or if you’re deaf or hearing impaired.”
“Compensation” is currently playing at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center in New York and the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. For more information about upcoming playdates in other cities, please click here.
To hear Zeinabu irene Davis’ full Toolkit interview, subscribe to the Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also watch the full interview on IndieWire’s YouTube page.
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