FCB Chicago redesigns film captions to carry emotion — two Cannes Grands Prix, an Oscar

For more than fifty years, closed captions have been a purely functional afterthought: flat white text that tells deaf viewers what is said but loses everything else — sarcasm, joy, anger, who is speaking, what the music is doing. FCB Chicago, the Chicago Hearing Society (CHS) and film company Rakish Entertainment set out to fix that, treating captions not as compliance but as creative work.

Over nearly a year, the team researched, prototyped and tested dozens of caption variations against iconic scenes from acclaimed films, working in person and remotely with Deaf and Hard of Hearing participants. The result is an open-source design system in which animation, colour and variable typography convey emotion, tone and pacing, adapting to the voice and sound of each moment — including speaker attribution, synchronisation and intonation.

The idea reached the top of the industry. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences included the system in the Oscars submission rulebook, and recognized the captioning technology and its contributors with an Award of Merit — an Oscar statuette — at its Scientific and Technical Awards on 29 April 2025. The system is free for studios, production companies and streaming platforms to adopt.

At Cannes Lions 2025 the work won Grands Prix in both Design and Digital Craft, with juries noting that for over 50 years captions had been 'largely unchanged' and designed 'to be solely functional'. A small piece of interface became a new industry standard.