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Week 9: Captions, music and audience
Make a video accessible and intentional by using captions, sound choices and platform formats responsibly.
19 April 2027
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A captioned edit is not a compliance afterthought — it is the version most of your audience will actually receive, muted, on a phone, in public. This lecture works through caption craft (reading-speed timing, minimum duration, phrase-based line breaks, safe areas), the different jobs music and ambient sound do in non-fiction work, and why aspect ratio and duration are decisions made at the shoot, not in the export.
Outline
We start from the distinction between subtitles (speech only) and captions (speech plus meaningful non-speech audio), then work through the timing rules that make a caption legible rather than merely present, and open versus closed captioning trade-offs. From there we compare music’s connotative, emotion-cueing role against ambient sound’s evidentiary “you are here” function, including the risk of music overriding what the image documents, and a short pass on music rights for student work. The session closes on aspect ratio and duration as audience-context decisions, and ties both back to this week’s practical milestone: building a final-project shoot schedule and re-confirming every permission it depends on.
Bring a 30-second test sequence from the final project and its current caption draft.
Teaching team
- ZIMU LI — convenor