Digital Writing Month: Captions

Digital Writing Month has been bothering me--but in a good way. I want to write, but I've not really felt like I knew where or how. In my research life, I've had a bit of that same struggle. While I'm solid about screen casting, there are some other loose threads. But, somehow, I've managed to come back to captions. Fortunately, much of this was solidified today with a long conversation with Sean Zdenek today. Sean's the author of Reading Sounds, a book on captions that is coming out in about a week. Sean was also a dissertation committee member, and he's the one who first turned me on to captions. So it was pretty fitting to talk about captioning with him!

I've been trying to find a way to connect research to my normal life. I watch a lot of series, and I watch some of them repeatedly. I know the shows and characters. Captions are always on when I watch, and I feel like I get more from the show than when only audio is running. Always want to read the screen while watching, and a show without captions is, well, just missing something. So I've decided to get back to something I really like.

Then it hit me, #DigiWriMo also explores multiple texts and media. It's about process, expression, and exploration. What better way to combine two ongoing projects or paths than to work on my captioning during #DigiWriMo. Only I'm not interested in standard captioning. I want to play, explore, and push captioning to places that it rarely goes. In order to do this, I need to up my tech game. This means grappling with After Effects and Premier Pro. Already on my computer they are, so that's good.

This afternoon I've spent literally hours learning AE and PP. I'm not very good, no. Not at all. However, I was able to take one of my favorite scenes from The Wire and do a brief experiment. I wanted to see if I could do some basic animated text effects. 

This is my rough draft. I'm not tight. I'm not awesome. However, I am motivated--and I've spent about four hours getting here, and I liked it. So, yeah.


Glad to be back in #CaptionLand.