– part one – 

It seemed so simple, didn’t it?

First, an establishing statement:

The inherent poesies of subtitling effectively allow me to combine writing with visuals, creating an audio-visual poem of sorts.

Yes? yes.

When trawling the ‘world wide web’ for inspiration, it was immediately made clear that because of their intrinsic ‘poesy’, the inclusion or utilization of subtitles comes with a whole load of implications –

We’ll begin with the most apparent one, shall we? Subtitles connote some sort of worldliness, or weight towards their respective film texts. Ostensibly as they are most frequently seen on films which require subtitles (foreign, silent, artsy).

Another big implication is the emphasis on words – that something is subtitled infers a – meaningful – emphasis on the words that are being spoken.

And finally, since the advent of the internet, and subsequent proliferation of such creative platforms as ‘Tumblr’ and ‘Instagram’ people have been using the subtitle ‘form’ to make ‘memes’, adding ‘extra’ information to screen grabbed content, supposedly to make them ‘funnier’ or even in order to reference or create some kind of ‘in-joke’.

This makes it difficult to discern ‘real’ captions from ‘shopped’ captions.

In my case, the best use of subtitles would be to add story, whilst enforcing that the viewer SEE and HEAR everything. At this point, I’ve ruined my project by failing on the HEAR quotient, i.e, I do not have good enough quality sound. I will rectify this situation by finding sound grabs over the weekend. I need to go somewhere still, with nature and preferably birds. Maybe some water.

Here are some results returned by a simple ‘subtitles’ google entry.

 

 

This is interesting. The manipulation of subtitles can add humor or intensify the humor which is already present.

It can add to the image, add to the story, or it can change the story. Alter meaning, so to speak.

I think that the ‘manipulation of meaning’ will be the focus of my film, but hey, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

Taking the ‘subtitle’ detour on the filmmaking road is a treacherous move. The path is complicated, with many a false twist and turn, the signs don’t make any goddamn sense and it’s tricky to navigate. And there are small implications which go way over the casual student filmmaker’s head, and run far deeper than their emotional capacity. I don’t know if I want to take this particular road, if I’m completely honest. I feel as if a cost-benefit analysis is in order, and I feel that although there could be a great reward at the end of the detour, my psyche would not withstand the journey.

Here is a subtitle test that I prepared earlier. The last one won.

How about that quality hey?

Anyway.

I’ve just now realised that I’m not being very kind to my viewer. I’ve never even considered whether or not the subtitles are easy to read. I guess it’s important to an extent, but hey, wait, I just realised, I don’t give a damn about the audience. It’s my art bitches! If you’re having trouble reading my words then go get some damn glasses. Big writing is for BITCHES.

Just kidding. I do care, to some extent. The font size and weight are difficult to read only when on a small player. When full screen, they read just fine. Or so they should. Remember to watch in HQ! Like! Comment! Subscribe!

– part two –

Fast forward 48 hours. It’s still the year 2017, don’t worry, you passed out after you tried to eat one of those 20-nugget-boxes that KFC (The Colonel & Co) are offering at the moment and you’ve been asleep since. I’m glad you’re awake now, I was two hours away from contacting a nurse-on-call. Never fear, whilst you slept I have been working tirelessly at my sequence and have procured a test model.

So much of this is off that I don’t even know where to start on remediating it. There are so many problems!

When working with subtitles, I found that the timing and duration are the most difficult to manoeuvre successfully.

The length of time when the titles appear on screen and the length of time in between each title is of deep significance. If anything is slightly off then the whole timing and momentum of the sequence is thrown off.

And it alters the meaning – of both the vision and the words themselves. 

Unfortunately, I ran out of time and patience to completely fine-tune my work when conducting this test. But I am ok with the result, to some degree. A few more tweaks may be in order.

Also, don’t even get me started on the myriad of other challenges which constantly threat to completely massacre my resolve. The audio files were disrupted by raucous wind, yes, but I don’t mind that. In fact, the crackles and pops cause by severe buffeting of the microphone add a nice lo-fi grimness to the whole thing. It’s very disparate, and goes with the finality and bleakness of the poem. I think. The problem with audio is that I somehow managed to completely confuse everything, and now I can hear the same lady’s crawing voice say the same indiscernible thing twice in the little intro. Terrible goddamn business.

– part 3 –

Oh man, you’ve done it again! This time I pushed you down the stairs because you’d leeched all of our internet data for the month downloading episodes of Anthony Bourdain. Just kidding, that was me. I don’t know what happened but 48 hours have passed and now that you’re here I can show you another trial that I’ve been working on. This one is a little bit embarrassing.

I tried doing a voice over test, and I left the subtitles up for the purposes of trial and error. With the subtitles, the combined effect is too much, it takes away from the footage a bit too much for my liking. Then again, I’ve deliberately left long pauses in between each sentence, in order to force the viewer to take in the vista.

To concur, this attempt was a veritable venture on my part, but, to be truthful – I think that it is too thin of a mask to fully hide my awful abuse of sound.

I also ran a test without the subtitles, with the voiceover.

– part four –

Holy shit man, wake the fuck up! I’ve just uncovered something INCREDIBLE. It might be nothing… but… if it’s what I think it is, then hold onto your hat – the rollercoaster’s starting and it just got a WHOLE LOT FASTER and WAY SMOOTHER!

But I need more time, will return with news concerning the revelation later. For now, let’s talk about this sequence.

This was just a mock-up of what the rest of my film might look like. We have here some examples of how I might like to edit the footage that I have been stockpiling since week 8.

The addition of subtitles and/or voiceover to my footage will create meaning and intention, form some kind of structure, thereby completing the purpose of my practise.

The end result will be four sequences with different  ‘stories’. Each sequence will be separated by a 10 second black out. The overall theme of the film will be ‘meaning’.

I guess I should probably address the current situation, shouldn’t I? Here we go.

What I have in my collection is shots of 5 different locations and one small collection of [miscellaneous]. They are filmed to the best of my ability, to suit my intended aesthetic and purpose of practise. Static. Most are wide shots. Framed to the best of my ability within the rule of life [rule of thirds].

The shots from locations [1: park1 , 2: you yangs, 3: guernica and 4: leanne’s house] were filmed on a Sony MC50 and tripod.

[park2] and other [misc] shots were filmed on an iPhone 6, sans tripod, on hands desperately trying to mimic the steadiness of a tripod.

At this point, the sound files that I have scrounged have come from clips, but as I progress I will be rearranging and mixing up different sounds from different clips. Frankensteining it, so to speak. I am excited and terrified to see how it will go, especially considering that time is running out.

And here I am talking about it, instead of doing it!

Classic.

– part 5 –

I completely forgot to address the revelation…

There has been a simple solution to the testing of captions this whole time.

When a video is uploaded to Youtube, you have the option to implement your own subtitles.

It is far simpler and less time consuming than my previous trial-and-error-Premiere-attempts that I so weakly and disdainfully conducted. At the same time, it removes my creative integrity from the situation.

– i.e – Youtube provides a standard format for subtitles, meaning that I do not have control over their font, weight, size or even positioning. Another issue is that you have to create, manipulate and perfect all of the subtitles in one session, and thereafter if you make one mistake, you are forced to either deal with it and leave it be [possibly destroying your perfected project in the process] or go back and do it all again.

Which is exactly what happened in this test. As you can see, it is the same sequence as before, but this time I shall give you the key to unlock the next progression of my tests: merely click the subtitles button at the bottom of the player and all shall be revealed.

As you can see, this was a haphazard attempt. Because, as you may remember from earlier in the discourse, I was extremely excited to uncover the subtitles function on Youtube! I also ad-libbed the captions, so if they don’t make any sense to you, then that is why. And finally, the reason that the timing is so skewed is because I didn’t know that once you ‘published’ your captions, you could never go back. I just didn’t know these things.

The only situation that I will use these Youtube subtitles is as an afterthought. I am going to go with the voiceover function. If I feel like adding subtitles later on then I will use the Youtube subtitle function.

Trying subtitles on Premiere was fun, but in the end a massive pain in the ass and so time consuming.

How will all of this end? Only time will tell.

It doesn’t mean anything anyway.

Thanks for watching!