u/charmarv

One of the things I really enjoyed doing for my thesis film was essentially set design/set dressing. I modeled the environments and then referenced in props (modeled by a classmate) and placed them appropriately so the rooms looked believable. I also organized everything in the outliner and made sure history/unnecessary layers/etc were deleted so that the environments were ready to be brought into each shot. We called it “layout” but now that I’m looking into layout artist positions, it seems like that term more often refers to setting up cameras and sometimes doing basic animation. Is there a better term for the kind of role I did? Does that job even exist in the industry or is it split into a couple different roles?

Hello! I'm working on the captions for a student short film and have encountered a couple bits that I'm not entirely sure what to do with and I thought this might be the best place to ask. There is a decent chance that this film will be seen by at least one Deaf person so I want to make sure the captions are readable and make sense. If it helps, this will likely only be shown to American audiences.

Thing #1: The sentence is spoken over multiple short shots. When I was looking up captioning standards, it was recommended that captions don't go beyond the end of the shot but they also recommended a minimum caption length of at least a second and these cuts are closer together than that. The sentence in question is "In fact, please keep looking in there because there's definitely nothing out here" with emphasis on "definitely" and "nothing," kind of like it was written as "there's DEFINITELY. NOTHING. out here." It's broken up over the shots as follows:

Shot 1: In fact, please keep looking in there

Shot 2: because there's

Shot 3: definitely

Shot 4: nothing

Shot 5: out here.

Each shot lasts only as long as it takes to say that piece of the dialogue, so the last four shots are all less than a second each. The action that happens on screen during these shots is pretty significant. If you were watching this film, would you prefer those captions be separated by cut or written as one caption that stretches over all the shots?

Additional, related question: In general, is cutting captions off at the shot cut helpful or does it get annoying? There are several times where the dialogue ends right as the shot does (or slightly after) and I'm a little worried that there may not be enough time to read the caption and also see what's happening on screen. The captioning guide I read really hammered home "give adequate time to read" and "don't let captions carry over to the next shot" and I'm not sure which to prioritize.

Thing #2: There is a shot where a character comes face to face with her enemy and it's made to resemble a cowboy standoff. The character is in a standoff pose, the letterboxes close in, a 2D tumbleweed floats across the screen, and the audio has some typical standoff things (acoustic guitar strum and a hawk cry). The audio is a huge part of the joke so I don't want any Deaf viewers to miss out, but I have no earthly idea how to properly describe that audio. Does "[acoustic guitar strum, hawk crying]" make sense? Is there something better?

Additional things that I *think* I'm doing correctly but honestly I'm not sure:

Character speaks in a sing-song voice: "[singing] I'm ho-ome."

Swearing (audio is censored with a bleep): "Even with the [bleep] AC-"

Off screen speaker: "- I don't think they ever fixed it." (Would it be better to identify the speaker? Like "[LEX]: I don't think they ever fixed it."?)

Briefly overlapping audio:

Shot 1: "It's been a long day at work, you're probably tired-"

Shot 2: "What? It-it's barely even-

- You're not thinking straight." (This is the one I'm most unsure about. Would identifying by character names be better? They're both on screen the whole time.)

Mutliple sound effects happening at once: "[sirens, distant screaming]"

If there's anything else that's preferred (or, alternately, irritating), please let me know! None of the dialogue has been edited out of the captions and we're doing closed captions (instead of burned in subtitles) so they can be toggled on and off and (hopefully) the format can be changed by the user. They're placed in the center of the bottom of the screen and are white text in a sans serif font on a slightly transparent black background. They do not obscur any important information.

I (25 year old male) have a non-anemic iron deficiency. My ferritin went from 8 to 23 after five months of oral supplements (325mg ferrous sulfate daily). I was told today that since my levels were slowly going up, we didn't need to do any GI testing to determine the cause, which surprised me. I feel like maybe we should figure out why my levels got that low in the first place??? I don't want to push my doctor if that's unreasonable though, so I wanted to see what the standard protocol is for this.