Creating Captions for the Hearing-Impaired Audience

There are a number of interesting challenges in creating the captions for my movie, “Claustrophobia.”

Because the main purpose of creating them  is to make the movie accessible and understandable to the hearing-impaired audience, a number of  special considerations come into play.   Firstly, since the main character (Tim Patterson)  signs frequently, is it necessary to caption every line of dialogue.   Secondly, because the story is so much about  how Tim hears (or doesn’t hear) and there  are many many sound effects (often in layers),  there is the question of  how much detail about the sound to include in these captions.

My strategy is to be conservative and include (at least initially) as much as possible, and then depending on the input I get from the distributors and the audience, to make adjustments.

I don’t want the captions to become a distraction, but I also want to make sure that there is enough information to make the experience of watching the film as full, complete, and satisfying as possible for the hearing-impaired audience.

Maybe (he says, thinking out loud) when I’m done with the first pass, I should watch it with the sound turned off.     Any thoughts out there?

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