Captioners have the whole surface of the shiny rectangle to work with, so describing positions onscreen requires a system. As live captioners, ours is very simple. The screen is divided evenly into 20 lines, and they're numbered from 1 to 20. Line 1 is at the top of the screen, line 20 is at the bottom. Our scrolling captions can take up any two sequential lines. </technical stuff>
Captions are scrawled like marginalia across the surface of audiovisual content, they cover up anything underneath, like a moustache on the Mona Lisa.
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| It's so nice to have you back where you belong. |
How many problems that causes for the viewer, and how best to avoid doing so, depends heavily on client (ie TV channel or broadcasting company) preferences, industry conventions and practical expectations. The paramount consideration, of course, is that the most essential visual information is least likely to be obscured. Next consideration is to avoid endlessly bouncing around like a dated Flubber reference.
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| Timelessly elegant. |
But it also takes a few seconds for line changes to kick in, so as captioners we need to be both on our toes and stoical about the fact that sometimes we'll know that we're covering something important, but it will already be too late.
So what do we look for? For news, panel discussion and interviews, the key visual elements are supers (superimposed graphic bars containing explanatory material, generally in the lower third, an industry term which usually doesn't mean the entire third), moving lips, eyes, occasional infographics, weather maps, 'hardwired' subtitles which all viewers see (used for translation or to clarify bad audio recordings), and incidental recorded vision, particularly around sport. As a general rule though, there's a near-perfect sweet spot, which we unceremoniously dub "line 16". It's about chest-level on any talking heads, about lectern-level on any press conference, above most supers and hardwired captions, and below any vision which frames the action in the centre of the screen. It looks a little something like this:
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| It's always the manic pixies. |
I note in passing that these examples are from The Google and not from my employers. They may have their own standards, rules and technologies, which my own opinions regarding the success of their placement may not reflect. In any case, you see above that the captions fall nicely between the crime scene photographs, and the supers containing the time, the network, the temperature, the scrolling newsbar, the location and headline and the 'breaking news' graphic. This too shows the magic of line 16 in action:
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| New age parents, man. |
You see how elegantly it gives viewers access to both the speaker's elegant bone structure and classical good looks, and the informative captions. Most speakers on these kinds of programming are framed in exactly the same way, so it's widely applicable. These, on the other hand, are less successful:
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| Lard, gross. |
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| It's a tough gig. |
Both of these confine themselves to lines 18-20. In the first, we lose whatever is being said about dieting and intimacy in the super, while in the second, there's a more serious side as that super may have featured important evacuation information, which viewers need.
I mentioned lips and eyes a moment ago. I'll just note in passing that there's more to that than aesthetic considerations. If the captions are in any way less than complete, deaf viewers may wish to lip-read. Anything which prevents that is indeed a fail.
So that just leaves weather and other graphics. Here it's as simple as raising captions to the top, dropping them to the bottom, or anywhere there's a reliable gap. For the weather, the shape of the continents comes into play. In Australia, line 1 just clears Darwin.
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| Not actually kidding when I say we sometimes bend that rule in cyclone season. |
While for the UK,
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| Rakishly dapper fellow. |
For sport, it's the scores, other incidental graphics, and the play itself which need to be considered. Luckily, here too there are some useful trends. Sport is unerringly visual, and it often foregrounds bodies over faces. In many sports, you could imagine following the play if you could only see legs, but perhaps not if you could only see chests and heads. It's convenient that we're usually dealing with the extreme top left or extreme bottom left for scoreboards, it puts them out of our way. Out of the top or bottom, we usually choose line 1. This illustrates the problem with the alternative:
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| Captioner multitasks, with mixed results. |
These captions could very easily obscure the player's footwork, and if they move to a second line they will also clip the scoreboard. Again though, it can be varied, and a larger score insert might necessitate getting freaky with some line 2 action.
That's about it for live caption placement. There is just one other thing I wanted to mention. It's from the world of offline captioning, which is not my area, but film studies is and it's cool. It's horizontal placement - the use of left- and right-justified captions in dialogue. So there's an editing convention in cinema called the 180-degree rule. It's demonstrated here:
It basically means that when you're shooting a conversation conventionally, one character will tend to mostly be left of frame, the other right. The main purpose is to give viewers a coherent sense of the space. As a bonus though, a corresponding left or right caption alignment can clearly and stylishly show who is speaking. You end up with something which looks like this:
Neat, huh?
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