About:
Captioning on Captioning (2020) is a short film by Louise Hickman and me, made in collaboration with real-time writer Jennifer. The film was conceived as a way to document the failures of speech-to-text translation work and to focus on the intimate knowledge and care required to produce access.

Over a series of meetings in late 2020, we worked to externalize the process of real-time writing for Deaf and hard of hearing readers. By inverting its usual invisibility, we edited the film to foreground moments of care, vulnerability, and intimacy. Using screen-sharing on Zoom, we made visible Jennifer’s work, including dictionary building, transcription errors, and latency.

In editing, we resisted smoothing out phonetic mishaps or tidying dialogue, pushing back against the demand for seamless, automated text.

This work is distributed by LUX

Year: 2020

Materials: 7 min 16 sec film, HD Digital file