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capri0mni1. A few days ago, I posted some links by / featuring Deaf film maker Wayne Betts Jr. In the lecture I linked to, he pointed out the main problem he has with captioned subtitles -- namely, that in Signed Languages, the cultural norm is for people to maintain constant eye contact while communicating, even when their walking down the street... But when a film has captions at the bottom of the screen, you have to break your focus on the actor to read the static lines of words at the bottom of the screen, and that pulls you out of the story.
In Gallaudet: The Film (2010), he solved this problem by having the words appear in the air around the actors' faces as they spoke and signed... This effect is shown between ~4:30 - 6:30, if you want to take a look.
Anyway, when I woke up this morning (I think it was this morning... might have been yesterday), it occurred to me that this could be the very same reason that so many American English speakers hate to go see foreign language films: it's hard to get immersed in the story, if you have to keep pulling your gaze away, and wouldn't it be neat if all language translation happened in "3-D" modeling, like that, in the space within the film?
Some might assume it would be distracting, but I think it could really work well, especially if it's a film adaptation of a graphic novel (which is a popular film genre, now), since, in graphic novels, the dialog already happens as embedded in the field of action, so people are used to seeing it.
2. And the day after I posted about Deaf film making, this film showed up in my subscription list: Cinematic ASL That! Establishing Shot, where the vlogger talks about the overlap between cinematic technique and ASL storytelling (I highly recommend this guy -- his captioning is full of Internet Meta-Lulz and GeekSpeak). He also talks about the "Establishing Shot" as a technique in storytelling in general, regardless of format or language.
3. With that in mind, I decided to play around with this sonnet-thingy, which I wrote back in July of last year... I'm experimenting with shifting the "establishing shot" of the opening quatrain around, to see how that changes the flow, clarity, and meaning of the whole. The end result, if I ever get there, may be just a tweaked version of the original, or it may be an entirely new piece. Too early to tell.
4. Random list item is random! I've always been fascinated by why "alphabetic order" is the order that it is... probably because I have a deep-seeded aversion to the totally arbitrary, especially in the realm of human invention.
I mean, I can totally accept that the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun, and this is just the right distance to keep most of our water in liquid form, just because of random chance. But the alphabet is a human invention, and humans are subjective, and have reasons for things. And it bothers me that I'm expected to accept the alphabet without any reason at all.
But whenever I query the Internet on this point, the only answer I've ever gotten is some variation of:
"Alphabetic order is very old, and can be traced back to the early script of the Phoenicians, though some letters have been added, and/or changed before it transformed into the alphabet used by the Romans..."
Yes, yes... All that's fine. But Why?
...It makes me cranky.
5. Is it just me, or was DreamWidth & LiveJournal like a pair of ghost towns on Saturday? Is it like that every Saturday, and I just never noticed? Where were you people?!
In Gallaudet: The Film (2010), he solved this problem by having the words appear in the air around the actors' faces as they spoke and signed... This effect is shown between ~4:30 - 6:30, if you want to take a look.
Anyway, when I woke up this morning (I think it was this morning... might have been yesterday), it occurred to me that this could be the very same reason that so many American English speakers hate to go see foreign language films: it's hard to get immersed in the story, if you have to keep pulling your gaze away, and wouldn't it be neat if all language translation happened in "3-D" modeling, like that, in the space within the film?
Some might assume it would be distracting, but I think it could really work well, especially if it's a film adaptation of a graphic novel (which is a popular film genre, now), since, in graphic novels, the dialog already happens as embedded in the field of action, so people are used to seeing it.
2. And the day after I posted about Deaf film making, this film showed up in my subscription list: Cinematic ASL That! Establishing Shot, where the vlogger talks about the overlap between cinematic technique and ASL storytelling (I highly recommend this guy -- his captioning is full of Internet Meta-Lulz and GeekSpeak). He also talks about the "Establishing Shot" as a technique in storytelling in general, regardless of format or language.
3. With that in mind, I decided to play around with this sonnet-thingy, which I wrote back in July of last year... I'm experimenting with shifting the "establishing shot" of the opening quatrain around, to see how that changes the flow, clarity, and meaning of the whole. The end result, if I ever get there, may be just a tweaked version of the original, or it may be an entirely new piece. Too early to tell.
4. Random list item is random! I've always been fascinated by why "alphabetic order" is the order that it is... probably because I have a deep-seeded aversion to the totally arbitrary, especially in the realm of human invention.
I mean, I can totally accept that the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun, and this is just the right distance to keep most of our water in liquid form, just because of random chance. But the alphabet is a human invention, and humans are subjective, and have reasons for things. And it bothers me that I'm expected to accept the alphabet without any reason at all.
But whenever I query the Internet on this point, the only answer I've ever gotten is some variation of:
"Alphabetic order is very old, and can be traced back to the early script of the Phoenicians, though some letters have been added, and/or changed before it transformed into the alphabet used by the Romans..."
Yes, yes... All that's fine. But Why?
...It makes me cranky.
5. Is it just me, or was DreamWidth & LiveJournal like a pair of ghost towns on Saturday? Is it like that every Saturday, and I just never noticed? Where were you people?!
no subject
Date: 2012-03-18 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-18 03:09 pm (UTC)It was just a strange fluke... I read about 30 or so journals on LJ and DW (admittedly with a lot of overlap), and on both sides of the journal divide, there were no personal or community entries after about 8 pm on Friday until about 11 pm Saturday (there were RSS feed updates, but that was it).
It was just weird.
Glad you had a great time antiquing!
no subject
Date: 2012-03-18 06:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-18 07:01 pm (UTC)(though, actually, you're odds are even better -- you're one of my Three Good Things (the post I just made, right after this this one).
BTW, though I won't include a link, I can give you the name of the nail polish.
It's "Magnetix" by "China Glaze"
...All the best mad science is spelled with an 'x'.
*nods*
Trufax!
no subject
Date: 2012-03-18 08:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-18 08:25 pm (UTC)You know, there may be an access-locked post in the near future where I talk about shifting group identity in online social land, now that I've started to openly and proudly write about Disability experience...
It's very subtle, and just around the edges, but it's almost palpable...
no subject
Date: 2012-03-18 08:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-18 09:42 pm (UTC)But it hasn't been until recently that I've been making a deliberate effort to write songs from a Disability-centric view. The silly songs and Winter Carol songs I've written have all gotten much warmer receptions...
And, in truth, the change may be more in myself than in the weather, if you know what I mean...
no subject
Date: 2012-03-19 05:28 am (UTC)I believe you are right about the subtitling being a major reason why many don't enjoy foreign language films, and why some people prefer dubbed anime. It takes a little practice to get good at reading a movie. (Being a reader, I find subtitles to be value added.) Another major reason, however, is that foreign films don't follow the narrative structure or conventions of American mainstream movies. It's one of the reasons I love non-Hollywood films; I find the difference in story telling thought provoking.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-19 04:08 pm (UTC)Indeed. To borrow a simile from Douglas Adams (in an interview he gave around the publication of Mostly Harmless) it's like different cultures and storytelling conventions can provide us with a kind of triangulation on the human experience of the world, and what it means to be human.