“It’s frustrating when you’re reading captions and there are commas there for no reason,” said Antoniou. “Voice recognition will hear a pause and just immediately add a comma. It breaks up the flow of how you’re meant to read and understand. It happens all the time that you can tell something has been captioned by a program that doesn’t comprehend everything that’s happening.”

Bad captions can certainly undo an artist’s intentions. That’s why Shoshannah Stern is so invested in the captions on her projects. A deaf artist herself, she co-created and starred in “This Close,” a comedy about two deaf friends that premiered on Sundance Now in 2018. “I was very involved with the captioning process,” she said. “We were switching in between sound perspectives in Season 2, in an episode where [my character]’s hearing aids go out. When we got the cut, the captioner had written ‘NORMAL SOUND RETURNS.’ It was so interesting to think about, because normal is a subjective word.”

Stern inserted her artistic perspective into that caption. “I remember choosing to use ‘AMPLIFIED SOUND COALESCES’ instead, because it felt so specific to the experience of having your hearing aid turned on again. When I saw those words on screen, it felt exhilarating and really representative of our narrative.”

VFX Producer Joseph Servodio notes “…what made the most sense was to work on the shots in color, then our team presented them to Steve, predominately within cut context in our black and white look. Occasionally during reviews, we would flip back to the color look just as a quality check. Since black and white tended to be more forgiving, we would sometimes be able to see flaws in the color that we otherwise didn’t catch in the black-and-white viewing.”

Wētā FX’s work for the show included two types of shots: the boat action sequence, where each shot had a unique action, and a series of shots in a static location on the water. “For the action shots, our animation team crafted dynamic boats that could simulate motion through the water,” White says. “For the static shots, we invested in an automatic setup. Once the look of the sequence was established, we could run multiple shots through a setup and tweak each shot to taste. The setup was crafted as a primary lighting and comp scene, establishing the base look. The digi-double shots were the most challenging, but they also brought the most satisfaction. They needed to be spot-on likenesses to the actors, with the complexities of underwater clothing simulation, bubbles, hair motion and lighting while preserving detail. The way light exits skin underwater differs from in the air, so particular attention had to be paid to underwater digi-double rendering.”