Why I Gave In

Why I Gave In: On Using Closed Captioning Devices in Theatres
© Rhianon Elan Gutierrez
December 9, 2011

Tonight, I gave in and finally tried the latest in closed captioning movie theatre technology, CaptiView, to see the film "New Years Eve". I knew that I had to have captions to enjoy the film because it had so many characters in it. I enjoy ensemble films but I have not actually seen one in a movie theatre. I'm glad that I chose to use CaptiView because it gave me access to so many funny lines that I would have missed otherwise. But that is not the major reason why I'm glad that I used it.

My viewing experiences have usually been captions or subtitles on the picture or no captions at all. I have preferred not to use rear window captioning for various reasons, the main one being that it practically screams, "Deaf person here!" With open captions or subtitles, you don't need to worry about that. You're just an audience member. When I watch films, I am an audience member who wants to blend in with the rest of the audience and participate. The first film that I saw with subtitles was "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" in 2000. I was so excited to see subtitles on the movie screen that I think I may have cried when the film started.

I grew up wanting to be in the movies, then wanting to make movies. I never thought about accessibility in theatres. I loved images and how they made me feel, think, and experience humanity. I did not need words to understand emotion. I enjoyed watching animated films in theatres with my friends because it was about community and imagination. We recreated the animated worlds in our living rooms and backyards and made our own dialogue. At home, I read numerous books and watched captioned television and live action movies. I was happy.

When I went to film school, I encountered a level of exclusion that I had never before felt in my life. I was not only feeling shut out from my peers, but I felt shut out from technology. I faced a battle in college: I used real-time captionists in my classes but still struggled to get my teachers to make sure the films they chose were captioned or were going to get captioned by an outside vendor. Forget it if student films were captioned, including mine! Deadlines needed to be met and college students epitomized the spirit of procrastination. I watched many films with my eyes closed, even the good ones. I was exhausted and probably depressed. My friends couldn't believe I slept through even the foreign films.

When you use captions, you read a lot. Skilled caption users read super fast and still take in the beauty of the image. I want to experience the beauty and the words. Those beautiful, funny, tragic, and shocking words.

As a filmmaker, I naturally have aesthetic preferences. There are certain films that I like - independent, art house, foreign, and documentary - and three of these four are usually not captioned. My routine has been to make sure that I have enough sugar, caffeine, and brainpower to watch these films (and sometimes I research them beforehand). I usually bring a hearing buddy with me to poke when I have questions. My mother, best friend, and boyfriend are the fastest translators for me, but I've come to rely on them less and on my eyes and cochlear implant more. I usually say "no" to comedies and action films because there's too many sounds and quick lines that I miss.

I share my story because it's important to know where I come from. Today, I support accessible media and work to make media accessible as a filmmaker and advocate. I have high expectations for captions - the color, placement, timing, word choice, spacing, punctuation, and grammar - and why shouldn't I? I strongly believe in quality captioning that informs and/or enhances the viewing experience rather than distracts from it.

CaptiView is a small black box with a bendy arm and a lower metal part that swivels to enable you to position it in either one of your cup holders. You can set the box to where you want to view it. The box is about six inches wide and maybe three inches tall and has small corners around the words (which are about size eighteen font and the color of traffic light green) so that others around you cannot view them.

What I liked about using CaptiView was that it allowed me to sit wherever I wanted in the theatre and position the device in the place that was most comfortable for me. Because I have used captions for at least twenty years, I was able to make it a seamless experience to look up and down at the picture and words when I needed to do so. It was also easy to set up - I only had to turn it on, push the "A" button to select the auditorium I was in, and then push the "C" button to turn on the captions. They captioned the music, sound effects, and dialogue. I stayed awake the entire time, but maybe the bag of candy I ate had something to do with that, too!

The negative part of using CaptiView was that I had to use my hand and leg to hold the metal part in place because it would swing towards me if I did not. There were also some words missing from the dialogue, but this might not be true for everyone. I was able to follow the film and enjoy it but a large part of me felt anxious about distracting the people behind me with how much I was moving the device around. I'd like an anxiety-free viewing experience!

Overall, I'm glad that I used CaptiView and I see it as a progress in closed captioning in theatres. I know that we have come a long way, and I'm grateful for those who have developed and continue to develop technologies to make moviegoing a more accessible experience for the widest range of people. I'm grateful that I have support from so many of my deaf and hard of hearing friends. I'm still going to advocate for even better technologies that make the cinematic experience more universally accessible and enjoyable. Stay tuned!

Redefining disAbility Event: What Was Said

Redefining disAbility Event: What Was Said
© Rhianon Elan Gutierrez
Originally written and published on the TRANSIENTS film blog
October 11, 2011

Photo © Rhianon Gutierrez, taken on the iPhone 3GS,
with some help from Instagram.

Last night, I attended an event at the Creative Artists Agency called "Redefining DisAbility". I interacted with familiar and new faces. I saw people that I hadn't seen since I was a student at Chapman and others that I hadn't seen or spoken to since I buried myself in post-production for Transients. I was glad to see my friends and make new connections and discoveries.

I sat in the front row so that I could lipread and listen to all the panelists. It was wonderful. When my friend tapped my shoulder and pointed to the large white screen behind the panelists, I saw that they also had real-time captioning (CART). I was stunned. This was an event where there was no deaf or hard of hearing panelist. I did not request the captions. Someone somewhere knew that they were important at an inclusion event. Whoever that person was, I like the way that you think. I always tell people that we need people in the disability advocacy field to recognize that discussions on inclusion should include CART and not just interpreters. People should have the freedom to choose which access option they want. Thank you for giving me that freedom to use CART when I missed something a panelist said.

My favorite part of the evening was when the panelists shared their personal stories. They were funny and heartbreaking. People with disabilities are often called "inspirational". Teal Sherer of The Guild and My Gimpy Life (and Sandrine in Transients) shared how she hated being called that because it wasn't earned. Robert David Hall (CSI) spoke of how there were only two types of roles for disabled people in the 1980s: the inspirational disabled person or the angry disabled person. Hall is a series regular on CSI, where he plays a character who is three-dimensional and interesting. He's been on the show for years.

Christopher Thornton (Sympathy for Delicious) was once told that he "wasn't convincing as a disabled person" because he had occasional spasms (from his spinal cord injury) during his audition. He remarked that he wasn't sure whether he should be offended or see it as a compliment. Actor's Studio-trained Eileen Grubba (Hung) told of how she had the door slammed in her face numerous times because she "walked funny". She shared how these experiences have enriched her drive as an actress and an advocate for more inclusion of people with disabilities in the media. Her most important advice was to parents and creators to remind them to continue to be encouraging to young people with disabilities because they deserve a chance in media. She wasn't the only one offering words of encouragement.

"I want to see that percentage of people with disabilities have a shot," said Robert David Hall. "Fight fear and ignorance."

"Bullying hurts and it kills dreams," said Glee's Lauren Potter to much applause.

Danny Woodburn, famous for being on Seinfeld, said "Each of us has to have the courage to speak up." Danny was one of the wittiest and most articulate panelists.

Eileen Grubba concluded, "We need to stand up, write roles for each other, no longer accepting that 20% of our world is shut out of entertainment."

Events like this reinforce my purpose as a writer, director, and producer. I wrote Transients to give a voice to people with disabilities behind and in front of the camera. It's not going to be the last one.

-Rhianon Gutierrez
Writer/Director, Transients

Captions Do Not Ruin the Cinematic Experience

Captions Do Not Ruin the Cinematic Experience
© Rhianon Elan Gutierrez
Originally written and published on July 26, 2009 for Blogathon Vancouver.

In honor of the inspiring educational promo video above made by media access advocates in Australia, I wanted to re-share my first piece of activist writing. My friend Ganga from Vancouver emailed me to ask if I could contribute an entry about hearing loss for this 24 hour Blogathon that he did on July 26, 2009. Inspired by my educational journey with captioning, I decided to write on the issue. In film school, I watched so many films--and the ones that were the most accessible to me were those that I watched in my film history class that documented the birth of cinema to 1945.

It's no secret about the articles that I have written since 2009, and that the necessity of having educational access to films, especially in film schools, still remains.

Still from A Trip to the Moon (1902), a film by Georges Melies.

When cinema emerged as an art form in the early 1900s with the films of Melies and the Lumiere Brothers, moviegoers—both deaf and hearing—were able to experience its images on equal terms. Silent films were enjoyed by all who could see, but when the talkies came in the 1920s, they ushered in a new era of experiencing cinema, where sound and picture were one and title cards fell into oblivion. This radical change created the division that still exists today for the way that people with hearing loss can fully experience cinema. Closed captioning and rear window captioning have, in recent decades, tried to alleviate this barrier by providing words to accompany the sound, but even they come at a price.

My earliest memory is of myself at age two, looking into an encyclopedia and pointing at a picture of the stage actress Maude Adams. A lover of cinema, I always watched actors express themselves onscreen, mimicking their movements and lip motion. I wanted to be an actress, but I changed my focus to writing and directing years later because I realized that what I wanted to do was not only create, but to change. I attended film school at Chapman University for four years, where, as the only profoundly deaf individual in the film program, I experienced the absence of closed captioning in films that were especially prominent as a documentary film student: student films and documentaries.

Student-made films are very tricky to caption. Film students are often really stressed out to meet a deadline, are burning their DVDs at the last minute, running low on money, just plain careless, or all of the above when it comes to captioning an English-language film for anyone, let alone one person. Even I admit to not captioning a few of my films because I had no time and little help–which always puts me a horrible, uninspired mood. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown in post production on a five-minute film I directed in 2007 because the sound editing process was so grueling for me while I was simultaneously adjusting to my first year hearing sounds with a cochlear implant. Six months later, when I made a documentary about a man with hearing loss and showed it to my deaf/HOH friends, I had to caption it or I’d be a hypocrite. I listened to the footage over and over again and single handedly captioned the entire ten-minute film. It’s hard to convince other film students to physically dedicate the time as I did. I seemed to be good at informing fellow students about the benefits of captioning and getting them inspired to caption their films, but it never materialized. Perhaps I didn’t challenge them enough, or they ran out of time. Of course, there are also those who feel that words on the screen distract from the visual experience. Film students can be pretentious that way, and even I hate it when captions appear over someone’s face, or when they are white captions on a black and white film. I agree that captions shouldn’t distract; they should enhance. If people saw it that way, I’d hope they would be more accepting. It’s important to educate others about the benefits and proper use of closed captions, and especially to advocate for them in an educational setting (because access is required by law). If carelessness persists, then how can we work with current and future technologies to help future film students with hearing loss be on the same playing field as their peers?

DVD cover for Docurama's release of Touch the Sound (2004).

Documentaries are considered a progressive, social medium, albeit one that makes little profit. I’m a documentary filmmaker who has yet to see a dime from any of my films, yet I still think that money is a poor excuse for the absence of captions. It really comes down to two things: silence and a lack of accountability. One of my favorite documentaries of all time, Touch the Sound, about the deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, had closed captions. I loved the film, so I wanted to see Rivers and Tides (by the same director) but saw that it wasn’t captioned. It, like Touch the Sound, was released by Docurama, a major documentary distribution company. Many other documentaries from Docurama and from other distributors are often not captioned unless they are mainstream or are expected to have a large audience of people with disabilities. I understand that Touch the Sound had captions because a large portion of its audience was likely deaf or hard of hearing. If it’s one by Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine), Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me), or Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line), then it will likely be captioned because of popular demand, but if it’s Frederic Wiseman (who made Titicut Follies, a verite doc set in a mental institution) or the next controversial subject, it’s not captioned too often. While I watch a variety of films, I find mainstream ones to be limited in their depth, and feel frustrated about not being able to watch films like Rivers and Tides, unless I send it to a real time caption company and get it captioned for me, but even this is costly. To change this situation, it is necessary to “break the silence”—speak up to filmmakers, production companies, and distributors about making sure that the documentaries you care about are captioned. Hold them accountable for not getting the films you care about captioned. Don’t just settle for the mainstream ones or you’ll be missing out on some powerful stories that filmmakers or subjects went through extraordinary lengths to tell.

As an activist filmmaker, I seek to find inclusive solutions that would eliminate the barrier that sound created decades ago. I believe that we have the resources to make films accessible for those with hearing loss, but lack proper awareness and the knowledge of what it means to be advocates.