FCB turned captions into film craft that carries emotion and tone

Traditional captions tell Deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers what is said but not how it is said — emotion, tone, pacing and speaker identity are lost. FCB Chicago set out with the Chicago Hearing Society and Rakish Entertainment to give captioning a visual grammar for feeling.

The system was co-created with the community: for nearly a year, workshops tested prototypes on scenes from Pulp Fiction, Barbie and The Dark Knight, refining color, animation and variable typography until viewers could distinguish Bruce Wayne from Batman purely by type design.

Caption with Intention was released open source, free for content creators, studios, streaming platforms and broadcasters, removing cost and technology barriers to adoption and inviting the whole industry to adopt a richer captioning standard.