Captionistas! Plan of attack

Tin Bath director Gemma Fairlie and myself (Sophie Woolley) are developing our creative captioning system for a new comedy called You’re So Happy I Want to Die. Bit of a mouthful, but we hope it hints at a modern malaise, the Facebook envy that some people (not us, oh no) get when internet stalking.

Sophie Woolley (writer/performer)

I wrote the first draft as soon as we got the commission. It’s about Jane, an unhappy failed poet, thwarted in life and love (played by me) and her uber successful and happy best friend Alexis, aka Bridezilla, (played by Gemma – see above). Jane gets a shock when she finds out exactly what Alexis has in mind for her hen night (don’t ask).

Now we’re about to start collaborating with Sandbox boffins at our host venue, mac in Birmingham. This summer we will experiment with technology to see if it’s possible to capture the emotions in a performer’s voice and represent them visually onstage. We’ll also try to trigger and animate text automatically so the captions don’t pre-empt our comic timing or physical performance. Then we’d like to play with mapping movement to see if captions can follow the performer round the stage (to avoid the watching ‘tennis effect’ of traditional captions). Perhaps a bit like this:

.txt interactive digital performance

Loads of behind the scenes work for Gemma and me as director and writer and performers, so we’re hoping to recruit body doubles to stand in for us onstage sometimes so we can check what it all looks like. We’ll also play with a way to visually indicate when people are laughing or clapping (I’m deaf so I don’t always know if people are laughing)

We’ve also got to find some satirically minded designers or animators in Birmingham to design our image projections. So we’re working on a mood board to help brief designers.

Lots of tech to get to grips with, I feel like I know nothing at the moment, but looking forwards to collaborating creatively with some proper nerds. Maybe we need to think of a new word to describe our captions, because they aren’t just text. Dynaptions? Um…Suggestions welcome.

Find out more about Tin Bath and Sophie Woolley at http://www.tinbaththeatre.com/ http://sophiewoolley.com/ And you can watch a bit of our last captioned show (about a fight in a kebab shop) on vimeo here