In the fall of 2003 I was fifteen, in Mr. Parra’s sophomore English class at Highland High School in Bakersfield, California, and the assignment was to film a chapter of a novel titled The Grapes of Wrath.

The novel was divided between the groups by lottery. Folded slips in a bowl, one per group. I drew ours: the second half of chapter 22. I want that on the record, because nothing that follows is owed to the choice of material. We were handed it.

If you have not read it: a family of tenant farmers is driven off their land in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl and travels west to California looking for work, and finds mostly hunger and contempt. Chapter 22 is the one place that treats them like people, a clean government camp with its own rules, and the second half is the women of the camp committee arriving at the Joads’ tent to explain how it runs.

What we had was a borrowed camera, a borrowed tripod, no lights of any kind, and a castmate’s family home in west Bakersfield standing in for a migrant camp. Four classmates covering seven roles. A little brother who wandered in from the house and volunteered. Cash cost, approximately zero.

I have written about this film once before, in a single paragraph, in Journal 001, Why Deaf-led, as evidence in an argument about why Deaf-led and Deaf-friendly are not two shades of the same thing. The short version is that my group performed in ASL, the rest of the class was hearing and did not know the language, and I captioned every line by hand so they could follow it. Then I left the rest of it silent on purpose. That paragraph is still true and I am not going to write it again.

This is the other thing. The file came back off my first hard drive after sixteen years, and this year it was read properly for the first time: every caption transcribed, every timecode logged, the whole five minutes walked frame by frame. What that turned up is a piece of filmmaking I had stopped giving myself credit for.

The film is black and white

The whole thing is monochrome. Color appears exactly twice in five minutes, and both times it is a decision: the green of the cards at the front, and the yellow of the title over a still of a wooden cart of grapes strung with fairy lights.

Before any picture, there are three cards. RATED: DS. Then (DEAF and STUPID). Then just kidding.

Both letters are literal. D is for Deaf, because the film is performed entirely in ASL. S is for Stupid, because there is a man in a cow suit in it. And then, just kidding.

What the card is saying is: hey, this video is not what you think it is. It is Deaf and it is stupid. Just kidding. Enjoy.

Three cards, before a single frame of picture, telling a room what it is about to watch and inviting them into it.

What the captions actually do

Seventy captions in five minutes, plus three cards and a title. Every line of dialogue is captioned and there is none anywhere in the film that is not.

I had Sony Vegas, and I had Matt, who sat with me over two afternoons while I was cutting this and showed me where things were. That is the whole of the instruction. Nobody taught me captioning, nobody taught me how to build a scene, there was no style guide anywhere near me, and it had not occurred to me that captioning was a profession with rules of its own. Three years later I made the next film on my own.

Four things I would only recognize much later, from professional captioning, are already in there.

They are hand-timed, and they cut. Each one is held two to four seconds, and it cuts in with the signer and cuts out after, on the frame I chose. No fades and no dissolves on any caption in the film.

That was a decision, and there is proof of it a few seconds earlier: the three cards at the front of the film do dissolve, one into the next. So I knew where the transition lived and I knew how to use it. I just did not use it on dialogue. A dissolve is right for a title, which is design, and wrong for a line somebody is signing. Fading a caption smears a sentence across the moment it belonged to.

They break at grammar, not at width. A long passage at 42.5 seconds splits across two cards at a clause boundary, with the overlapping word carrying the reader across the break. Modern captioning guidance favours that. I did not know it did. It just read better.

And look at where she is standing in those two frames, because there is something else going on that I could not have explained at the time.

Her whole upper body is in shot. Her hands have room to move above the caption. The bottom of the picture is deliberately empty, so the text has somewhere to sit that is not on top of her.

That has a name now. Signing space. It is the area a signer’s hands actually work in, and if the camera crops into it you have not made a tighter shot, you have deleted part of the sentence. Frame too close and the sign falls off the edge. Put your captions too high and they cover the hands, which is worse than having no captions at all, because now the picture is lying about being accessible.

I say it on every set I run, twenty-three years later. Do not forget your signing space, so we can see your signs fully.

Nobody taught me that in 2003. It was not being taught in that classroom and I had never seen it anywhere. A face, two hands, an eyeline, the other people in the scene and a line of text all have to live inside one 4:3 frame at the same time, and I found out where the camera belonged by noticing what went missing when I put it somewhere else.

They caption more than words. At 76.5 seconds, over Ma’s reaction, the caption is “(gasped)”. A sound that is not a word, marked in parentheses, because information beyond the dialogue still belonged in the caption. At 279.5 seconds there is one caption set large and center-frame instead of small at the bottom: “NO! NO!”. Type size carrying force and grief.

They keep the dialect. I did not correct Steinbeck’s spelling into standard English. The captions carry the language as written, because the caption was the performance and not a label bolted underneath one.

One person, three parts, one scene

Stefanie played three parts. Rosasharn. Annie Littlefield. And Mis’ Joyce, the woman who confesses and takes the five dollars. Steinbeck’s Ladies’ Committee is three women, and in our version two of those three were her, on top of Rosasharn, in scenes where her characters have to be in the room together.

There is no trick in the film. I shot the scene twice.

First pass, Stefanie played Rosasharn, and I covered the other actors reacting to Rosasharn. Then we reset the whole thing, she changed into Annie Littlefield, and everybody performed the sequence again so I could get the committee coverage with Annie in it. Then I cut two separate performances of one scene together into a single unbroken encounter.

Which means the others had to match themselves. The same positions, the same timing and the same performance twice, closely enough to cut together, with no monitor to show them what I was matching. There is also a twelve-second insert of feet walking on carpet, shot at ankle height. It lands the moment after Ma spots the committee coming and Rosasharn bolts to go freshen up, and it is there to be dramatic. Who are these women, and why are these two suddenly panicking? Twelve seconds of shoes on a floor and not one face. It builds the dread, and it buys me an edit at the same time.

You cannot see it. When the film was read through this year, the person reading it had the cast list sitting beside him. He already knew Stefanie was playing three parts. He was looking for the cut on purpose, trying to find the place where two takes were joined together.

He watched Rosasharn, Annie Littlefield and Mis’ Joyce and read them as three different women anyway.

If somebody knows the trick, is hunting for it, and still cannot find it, then it worked. It has worked for twenty-three years.

I put the color in

But the color I actually added is not on a card.

It is a cow.

It started as set dressing. The chapter is set in a migrant camp, and a camp would have animals in it. Animals should exist too. So while the committee played their scene, I walked through the back of the shot in a full cow-pattern costume, right to left, in and out, doing what a cow does. Nobody in the scene reacts, because a cow in a camp is not an event.

Then it kept going, and it built its own story while the chapter carried on in front of it.

The cow is gone by then. It walked in, it walked out, and that was the whole of it.

Later, while the mother of five is insisting to the committee that she did not steal the toilet paper, a boy walks through behind her carrying a bucket. On his own, nothing to do with the cow. Nobody remarks on him. He is a person doing a chore, because a camp has people in it who are busy with their own day. In the same moment, one of the women slips out of frame, because she needs to change.

She comes back a while later, in a full nun’s costume, walks to the center of the shot, sits down, and watches.

I come back as the cow and find some weeds. The instant I start eating I look up, startled, and bolt. Behind me is the same boy who carried the bucket. He has put it down and picked up a rifle. This time he is hunting. He wants to eat too.

The nun watches the whole thing happen. The cow runs out of frame, the hunter runs after it, and then the nun, who has just watched a man chase a cow with a gun, loses her composure entirely and takes off after the hunter. All three of them are gone.

The nun comes back, except she is not the nun any more. She has taken the costume off and returned as the committee member she was actually cast as. She offers the mother help and gets scooted off. The scene carries on. Five dollars change hands. The tour picks back up in the center of the frame.

They start the next stretch of dialogue.

And the cow comes running into the shot and is shot dead in front of them. It drops in the foreground, a few feet from three women in the middle of a scene. The hunter walks in with the rifle, stands over the body, gives a single victory nod, and nods his way out to the left. Then the nun runs in and starts crying over it.

The whole subplot has spent the film hiding behind the chapter. For its ending it comes forward. It dies in the foreground, in front of three women who are still delivering Steinbeck, and it interrupts them where they stand. And the captions are in front of even that. Three layers in one shot: the caption on top, a cow being shot in the front, and the chapter carrying on behind it.

The three women in the foreground get interrupted by it mid-scene. You can watch them trying not to laugh. The mother of the story holds character and plays it disgusted and confused, which is the correct reaction to a nun weeping over a shot cow twenty feet away, and it is the funniest thing in the film.

NO! NO! That is the one caption in the film set large and center-frame, and it belongs to the nun.

Then Annie herds the other two out of frame, and we are left with a body and a nun.

She cries over it, alone. Then she leaves too, and the frame is just a dead cow in the dirt. Fade out.

Fade in. The cow gets up and walks off.

That is a complete story. It has a cast, a setup, an escalation, a death, a mourner, and a resurrection. The bucket is planted before the rifle is needed. The nun is the audience inside the frame, put there so you know how to react. The cow outlives the chapter it was hiding behind.

And none of it steps on a single line. Steinbeck’s chapter is about poverty, dignity, and the shame of taking charity, and I played that completely straight. I did not undercut it once. I ran the whole second film behind it, in the same shots, where you could watch either one.

None of it is in the chapter, either. Steinbeck has no cow, no nun, and no rifle. All of that is mine, and nobody assigned a frame of it.

That is not a story about a teenager being silly. It is the thing this company sells.

Twenty-three years later, that is still most of the job.

Work can be correct and still be nothing. The captions are accurate. The interpreter is booked. Every box on the list is ticked. Correct is necessary. It has never once been sufficient.

We make it correct and worth watching. That second part is the cow.

This company’s mark is a prism, and it is nothing but color. It took me twenty-three years to notice I had already drawn it once, in black and white, with a cow.

What happened in the room

Every group’s film screened in the same session, back to back. Ours earned an A+. Mr. Parra held the video up to the class as a shining example that could have done it right, and made clear that the Deaf students being Deaf was not an excuse. It landed immediately after the whole room had watched everyone else’s work in a row, which is what gave it force.

Then the class handwaved. Deaf applause, given by a mostly hearing room.

The other groups had shot theirs on a tripod, one take, whole scene, good enough. No captions and no editing.

I could not follow any of them. I sat there through film after film without understanding the work, and I was bummed and happy at the same time. Bummed, because I was in a room missing what everyone around me was getting. Happy, because we had pulled it off.

One more thing about that day that I had genuinely forgotten until the file came back. I did not hand in a tape. I authored a DVD, burned it, and carried the disc to class. I shot it, cut it, captioned it, authored it, and delivered it. I owned the whole chain, from the camera to the moment it played on somebody else’s machine.

What I would do differently

Three things, reading it back.

I would make that same rating card today · RATED: DS, then (DEAF and STUPID), then just kidding · and I would swap the second word. Everything the card does still works: it warns you, it sets the tone, and it invites you in. Stupid was accurate about a man in a cow suit and I meant it about myself. It is just not the word I would reach for now, with the company’s name on it.

There is an eight and a half second hold on black between the title and the first scene. I put it there on purpose. I thought it would feel appropriate. It does not. It is just a film that has stopped.

And there are no end credits. Not a stylistic choice. I did not know how to make them, it was the second half of a chapter, and it was a class project.

Three years later, the next film has a full credit roll. Bella, my class interpreter, is in it. So is everyone who worked on it, and friends and family who helped, and a thank you to Candice’s mother for letting us use her apartment, with her permission. The distance between those two films is exactly the skill I did not have yet. I learned to credit everyone, and I still do today.

The cast of this one has gone uncredited for twenty-three years. That is fixed at the foot of this page.

Why the film itself is not on this page

You will notice there is no video here, and only the film’s own words quoted back.

The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939 and is still under copyright in the United States until 2035. A classroom assignment in 2003 and a company publishing a film in 2026 are not the same use. The first is a classroom showing a class. The second is a company publishing an adaptation of somebody else’s novel to sell itself.

So the film stays in the folder. It is preserved, and it is not released, not uploaded, and not sold. What you get is the record: the captions, the timings, the story of the room.

Crediting Steinbeck is the right thing to do and it is not a license. What I am comfortable standing behind is the decision not to publish, not the credit line. An access company does not get to be casual about whose work it is standing on. That was true in Mr. Parra’s classroom and it is true now.

One more thing about the cow

You cannot tell this from watching it, because the costume covers everything.

When the cow gets up at the end, I am laughing. I had been holding it in for the whole take, lying still in the dirt while a nun wept over me and a scene about poverty and dignity played out twenty feet away. By the time I got to my feet I could not hold it any longer.

And I watched it again this year, properly, for the first time in a very long time. I laughed at him. At the fifteen-year-old in a cow suit getting up out of the dirt, twenty-three years ago, who thought that was the funniest thing anyone had ever put at the end of a film. He was right.

What I am proud of is not the technique. It is that I finished it. Plenty of fifteen-year-old boys go out and ride bikes with their friends, or play video games all night with pizza on the way and ice cream sundaes after. I did not. I carried this all the way to a burned disc and a room full of people. And it came out the way I could see it in my head, which is the rarest part. The clarity I wanted is on the screen. I would still watch it over and over, and I am still proud of it, which is not a sentence many people get to write about something they made at fifteen.

Everything else in this piece is craft. The captions, the timing, the coverage, the edit. All of that can be taught, and I have spent twenty-three years teaching it.

I have never worked out how to teach the enjoying. And as far as I can tell that is the part that has kept the work good, not the technique.

I still love doing this.