We started closed captions as a way to not wake up the baby. The baby is now 16 but we still have the captions on.
Probably, according to the teacher's reports.
Maybe the teachers should use the volume, as a complement to the captions.
I always use captions at home, when they're available, because I like being able to keep the volume down.
I do worry, sometimes, that I'm losing my ability to follow dialog without captions.
I worry about that too, but I assume I'll be able to caption people before long.
I think we also missed a lot of what was said and just rolled with it.
Right. That and that we don't know their name despite having talked at least weekly for a decade.
> the kids absolutely can't shut up and keep from talking over whatever is happening
I feel this so hard. And then they have the gall to be confused about what's going on.
I don't usually talk back to the characters, but yes.
Why is it closed captioning, by the way? Why not just "captioning"?
(Over here it's "subtitling").
I can't remember ever seeing an English-language film in a cinema with subtitles, but cinemas over here routinely have some of their shows with subtitles, so I presume I've just never happened to go to one of those showings. They have audio description via headphones quite a lot too, for people who can't see well.
I've been to films with two sets of subtitles - Malay and Chinese - and when the film itself has a third integral set of subtitles (as in it's English-language but there's one scene where a couple of characters speak French or something) the screen can really get rather crowded in the bottom half.
We tend to be a closed caption household, too, although it depends a lot on the show/film. I think a lot of audio is just really really badly mixed these days. I think it gets mixed for ear-bleeding volume, or for home cinema systems with 5.1 speaker systems, and when it's mixed down to stereo the dialogue track is massively undercooked compared to the FX and the music.
I have the same issue listening to our smart speaker. I find it uncomfortable listening to music on it for long, and I think it's part of the same thing (EQ, compression, etc).
The Austro-Hungarian Empire had eleven official languages and several other widely spoken ones, and if it was still around today the subtitling challenge would be amazing. "Tonight in the Carlsbad Odeon at 6.25, Avengers: Endgame, dubbed into German, subtitled in Hungarian, Croat and Italian, audio description available in Polish and Czech. Late showing at 9.50 dubbed into Ruthenian with Slovak and Ukrainian subtitles, audio description in Turkish, Yiddish, Carpatho-Romani and Friulian. For the benefit of our Ladino and Istro-Romanian-speaking customers, our polyglot usher will crouch unobtrusively in the aisle and mutter a simultaneous translation into the ear of your preference. No Lithuanian translation option is available at present due to an unfortunate outbreak of typhoid. Lithuanian patrons are advised to familiarise themselves with the major plot points in advance. No smoking, no readmission after the start of the film."
Vox did a good video recently about why film soundtracks gave gotten less intelligible over the years, and down-mixing from Atmos et al is a big part of the problem. You definitely have to take care to get your sound settings just right if you have a traditional 2-channel stereo system. On my old TV dialog would just disappear if I didn't explicitly switch Netflix to stereo every time.
Open captioning is when you can't turn it off. Like when you go see a foreign language film in the theater.
It's only "subtitles" when the dialog isn't in English.
If you watch a lot of foreign language cinema/TV you get used to subtitles pretty quickly. I'll turn on cc if I find I'm missing a lot of the spoken dialogue which mostly happens with more recent films and tv.
11.last It's standard to have Arabic here, and when the film is not in English you'll get Arabic and English. And with non-Hindi Indian films I've even seen Arabic, English, and Hindi which is nuts on the screen though at film festivals here where the language of the film is not English they'll have a separate digital bar below the screen to display the Arabic.
I imagine the development of the transatlantic accent was aided by its relative clarity.
It's only subtitleagne when it's from the something something region of france.
12/14: I think we had a discussion about that here at some point. I'm vaguely remembering.
I have pretty bad hearing, but it has been gratifying to discover that nobody can hear dialogue on a television any more. I still don't often use captions, but my (hearing person) teenage daughter does.
Dialog is for shitty movies anyway. All you need to hear is the Immigrants Song.
"Aaaah-ah ah-ah-ah" is just for the Flemish.
I must admit to occasionally feeling the need for Subtitles for the Hard of Thinking. A little bar at the bottom of the screen that says "(this bit was important because the bald guy told the guy you vaguely remember from The Wire that he never met the woman with the weird hair before, but we know he did really because there was that one shot in the last episode where you saw the two of them talking, so we now know that the bald guy is lying - the Wire guy hasn't worked it out yet though)"
27: His name was Count von Tellen before Ellis Island.
28. me too, definitely with convoluted plots-- crime, alternate reality/timeline stuff, and the like definitely assume that all conversation is legible. I think some current work is better watched with some rewind
And now more and more remotes have buttons to jump back 10 seconds only.
There are also styles of captioning. I tend to think of subtitles as only covering dialogue and captions as including descriptions of sound and music.
My first television was a small tv with terrible speakers that was 10+ years old when I got it and I didn't like to have volume up high watching tv late at night, so I've been using captions for a couple decades. Though my new thing is wearing headphones with the tv so I can listen and walk around, mostly because I used to live in a place that combined kitchen and living space in one room and I wanted to hear while cooking or dishwashing. But then I realized I had never been catching the softer parts of soundtracks and the music sounded a lot better.
The kids watch TV with captions on all the time, which I think started bc Noah watched a lot of Japanese stuff a few years back. I, however, can't stand it because I edit text all day for a living and I literally cannot stop myself from reading text when it appears on the screen and then get completely stopped when there's a typo and now I've missed something important that happened on screen. But now I only rarely watch TV at all any more aside from the news, so it's bothering me less.
There's a new detective series starring the guy who got spiked in the head at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I recommend it, even though there's some French in it.
We use closed captioning but I feel bad about it. I view it as a result of the general decay of my attention span. I'm not missing dialogue or plot points because of the kid, I'm missing them because I'm playing games on my computer or phone at the same time.
34: You mean Dr. Octopus? Cool.
I sort of feel bad about closed captioning also because it means I'm not engaging with the art enough to be worth the time and money I'm putting into it, but that would be silly to worry about too much, especially considering the art I'm engaging with.
Turning on real time captioning for work meetings is a lifesaver for both clarity and "oh shit I zoned out what were you saying?" purposes.
12/14:
I am firmly in the "blame sound designers" camp. I generally have the captions on, but if I'm watching something from before the year 2000, I don't need them. Old Star Trek episodes? Bright colors, clear sound. You can totally follow the action.
re: 37
... and is English.
Molina has had a pretty amazing Hollywood career when you think about it.
Just getting spiked in the head in the best opening sequence ever is enough.
Sound designers with a dollop of blame to Christopher Nolan, who stirs his dick in the sound design and has this lumped into his own vaunted genius.
re: 39
Yeah. It's another manifestation of "everything is shit", along with overly dark lighting design (in film and TV); horrible music production values* (in pop music), etc.
* get off my lawn, etc. But, nonetheless, it's true, and not just because I'm old and curmudgeonly.
43: Vox also did a video on that! Video allows you to shoot darker than you would dare on film because you can be sure you will get something usable out of the sensor.
The copyright laws around captions and subtitles are very mysterious and bizarre- the captions go with the broadcast, not the media? I don't really know. But the same show or movie on different platforms will have different captions, in different formats, with vastly different quality, and I wish Halford were around to tell me why.
Occasionally they mess up the timing of a joke, by allowing you to read too far ahead, and so it's spoiled before the ideal delivery moment. But generally I get a visual/audio merge-blend thing where it just shows up as input in my brain.
It seems like closed captions often deliberately clip down what is seen as inessential dialog, possibly more often these days. (Like "I'm the one who did it" could become "I did it.") I thought that made sense given the limited screen space, but I've heard someone with hearing problems highly annoyed at it.
42 It's interesting to compare and contrast the muddy shittiness of Nolan's sound design with the films of Robert Altman where you can't make out a lot of background dialogue because you're not supposed to, it sounds like real life, but the dialogue going on between characters that are the focus of a scene, that you can hear just fine and the rest of the stuff is just impressionistic and doesn't really matter beyond that.
I wonder if they're captioning based on the script, and then the actor ad libbed a little extra.
43/45 or everything being overly blue. Or overly yellow, if you're trying to take place in Mexico.
49: I remember seeing in a TV writer's TikTok that there's a specific term for dialog that's not intended to be heard with any clarity. It can still be scripted if it's not ad-libbed (say, it's a TV broadcast in the background that needs to be shot separately) but junior writers might be allowed to fill it with in-jokes or something.
re: 51
Yeah. Really over the top colour grading.
Everyone has always done that sort of thing. Michael Mann took it to fairly extreme levels with something like Manhunter, but it still worked as it was a really distinctive visual style. But now, it's just a lazy button that can get clicked in some digital workstation.
If you want to pivot from Vox video to reading a long article about unintelligible film dialogue.
My favorite caption description of such background dialogue is a series of 2 from Archer- Mallory says something at a meeting that inspires "quiet half hearted grumbling " and then says something else and there is "loud, full-hearted grumbling"
They should just make the font fuzzy to imply that it's unintelligible.
I still love the Austin Powers where they did subtitles but the background had patches of white where the subtitles were hidden.
It was right after the scene where he pissed into the ornamental pond.
52: Rhubarb? (As occasionally mocked on MST3K.)
55: I first noticed it because I couldn't hear the dialog at the end of Lost in Translation.
61: No, it was something more technical and general. I thought I remembered "tertiary dialogue", but I googled that and nothing relevant.
Captions often give away who people are before they've been introduced in the plot. It will use their name before anyone else has.
They're also useful for people like me who have crappy cultural knowledge. It will say "song x playing in background" when I never would have identified song x on my own but it turns out it's relevant to the scene.
56. 😍😍😍 Archer is so great. Still on, I see that season 10 is Alien-inspired. I feel guilty liking them so much, like high-grade junk food.
I like polyglot movies, 1899 was kind of fun.
||
NMM to Raquel Welch.
This instant!
|>
Captions often give away who people are before they've been introduced in the plot. It will use their name before anyone else has.
But only if they're speaking off-camera.
66: Appreciate the warning, since the twitter feed is suddenly overwhelmed with clips from 70's tv and movies that I once used for that specific purpose.
The page linked in 69 gets an average of 86 visits/day, 6 times more than visits to the page of Karl Barth's Epistle to the Romans and three times more than the page for the Kuramoto-Sivashinskii equation, both topics that have a small crowd of specialists. Truly, a fallen world.
It's probably people wondering about Walla Walla, Washington.
when somebody hott dies there should be a amnesty period
I feel like I need to go to more movies and practice watching movies the normal way.
The way I watch movies is so wrong. Roger Elbert would turn in his grave. Closed caption, sometimes I even fast forward, sometimes it is on my tablet because my kid has done something weird to the TV.
There's something about movies that are more like reading when I watch them at home--it is fitting somehow that I used the closed caption.
It's hard for me to sit and absorb them at times maybe because I feel guilty watching movies when I should be working or cleaning the house.
I feel like I need to go to more movies and practice watching movies the normal way.
The way I watch movies is so wrong. Roger Elbert would turn in his grave. Closed caption, sometimes I even fast forward, sometimes it is on my tablet because my kid has done something weird to the TV.
There's something about movies that are more like reading when I watch them at home--it is fitting somehow that I used the closed caption.
It's hard for me to sit and absorb them at times maybe because I feel guilty watching movies when I should be working or cleaning the house.
My son fast forwards though everything socially awkward. It's really hard to watch a movie with him.
76 reminds me of when my friend sat down to watch the opening scene of a show he'd heard was good, Fleabag, with his 16 year old daughter, not really knowing what the show was about, let alone the opening scene. They got through it, and it brought me much hilarity, so I am grateful.
If Obama dies will that mean we have to stop watching Fleabag?
I haven't seen Fleabag, but I want to be clear that the level of awkward I'm talking about is very low. Like standard sitcom stuff and he'll forward through.
It's not a real rule, guys. Dan Savage just doesn't understand the concept of fantasy.
The fleabag family dinner that begins S2 is a masterpiece for depicting and inducing awkwardness. Maybe Napoleon Dynamite comes close from the US? Sorry To Bother You? Jim Carrey's brilliant Kidding actually, but I don't think that was popular.
Usually embarrassment in American films is depicted as a trial for a character depicted sympathetically, a cause for empathy (or a deserved slight if the fulcrum character somehow deserves it, played for laughs), rather than as an ethically ambiguous emotion happening on the screen and maybe to us the audience as well. Brits on the other hand seem to be connaisseurs, lovingly detailed depictions of a variety of flavors.
there was a time during early covid when we all stayed home that i took/had the time to watch tv & i watched fleabag & dix pour cent & briefly felt like i was in the general current of contemporary culture. & now things happen in person again & i'm in hotel rooms & meetings & client dinners & tired & once again completely out of touch.
83: same! we tried fleabag but managed ten minutes before deciding not. But that's the only time recently when I've actually felt up to speed on The Shows People Are Talking About.
The woman from Fleabag is in the new Indiana Jones movie. But Alfred Molina isn't, because I guess getting a spike through the head is fatal in that universe.
re: 84
FWIW, Fleabag is one of those where the first episode is really not a great guide to how the whole series will develop.
I watched maybe 2-3 episodes and couldn't get it to stick? Does it get less depressing?
oh also that spanish series about the people working for ava gardner when she lived in spain & i loved, watched that too but it seemed strangely not known, its great highly recommend.
Season 1 of Fleabag is a downer, if you got through a few episodes you're probably not going to like it. I liked Season 2 a lot more. Not sure if you can just skip to S2 or if it relies on stuff from S1.
Archer was great but I can't believe it's still airing and in a 13th season. They really ran out of ideas and I stopped caring enough to follow, especially as one of the framing devices for the AU seasons was Archer comatose and hallucinating, which isn't great for the stakes.
80: ogged violates his own analogy ban, and now this. I begin to wonder if Unfogged even has an ethos.
Here's that defining blog post about teal-and-orange colour grading again: http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html
OT: If you see a squirrel going through a hole into the roof of a neighbor's house, should you tell them?
95: Yes.
I literally cannot stop myself from reading text when it appears on the screen
Same. I never want to know what is said before it's said, but with CC I always do.
We recently started The Crown (talk about being current!), and it's often difficult without captioning*, but I also like it less if we give in and turn it on.
*partly the accents, often they speak softly, and sometimes they're referring to something that is not top of mind for an American in 2023, like the name of any politician that isn't Churchill.
95: Yes.
I literally cannot stop myself from reading text when it appears on the screen
Same. I never want to know what is said before it's said, but with CC I always do.
We recently started The Crown (talk about being current!), and it's often difficult without captioning*, but I also like it less if we give in and turn it on.
*partly the accents, often they speak softly, and sometimes they're referring to something that is not top of mind for an American in 2023, like the name of any politician that isn't Churchill.
Dammit.
To expand to larger filmic gripes: boy, are people right that big movies are too goddamn long these days. Over the last couple of weekends I started the latest Bond and the second Black Panther, and ran out of time to finish. Or even come particularly close. I think I watched at least 90 minutes of both, and there's an hour remaining in each. The stakes aren't remotely high enough for me to care about either for that long. I'll probably finish both*, but it's an incredibly low priority.
*for the record, I thought the Bond was better, from an enjoyable watch POV, than both the reviews and BP2. I really enjoy watching Craig, the exotic locations were lovely, and it's rather well lit, even in nighttime scenes.
I don't understand what's driving the length. You'd think that you could make a shorter movie for cheaper and still make the same amount of money, maybe even more because of more screenings per day.
Here's a nice graph of movie length. The headline says that movies aren't getting longer, but that's nonsense. Later on it says more accurately: "Millennials (born 1980-2000) complaining that movies have gotten longer than they used to be: If you grew up watching movies in the 1980s, they have gotten longer for you!"
I don't really care if the squirrels think I'm a narc, but I don't want to piss off the raccoons.
The first non-animated movie I ever saw was Star Wars. It's mostly be disappointing ever since.
The Kids Nowadays call that one "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope," but they're wrong.
102 is a useful graph, but it feels like a place you need zero confidence interval as it appears to be an average of all feature films on IMDB. I'm sure there are movies not in there, but you're approximating the total population of what people mean when they say "the movies".
Since I've been working at a university library with a large media studies program and consequently a large DVD/Blu Ray collection I've been taking home piles of movies regularly. I often buy a lot when I go back to the states, mostly Criterion, but that stuff gets expensive (even with the half off sales). When I get home I divide the movies into piles, one for anything about 90-100 minutes or shorter and another for anything longer and make my selections from them depending upon how many a day I want to watch or how late it is.
love is news, 1937, we watched it recently on criterion, great movie clocking in at 78 minutes - more movies should be this length. solid recommend, also title accurate.
I'll put it on my list and check if we have it dq, thanks.