Cancer Captions

Showbread recently released their final album, and with it, an experimental movie based on their previous album, Cancer. As expected, the movie is a bit of a head-scratcher. It takes a few viewings to pick up on what is going on (I still don't understand a lot of it, but I think that's the idea), and I imagine it would be even more confusing for those who don't already know the music.

Additionally, the movie's core characters make up a punk rock band that frequently screams their lyrics in unintelligible fervor, which makes things even less approachable for "outsiders". In the hope that I could show this movie to friends without having them miss the lyrics, I took some time to subtitle the movie. I'd like to make these captions available for others who are also interested in showing Cancer to the uninitiated.

I used FFmpeg to add the subtitle file to the movie. It is available for Mac, Linux, and Windows, though I only know that my instructions work on Linux. If you need to change something on another platforms, leave a comment about it and I'll update my instructions accordingly.

1. Download the caption file to the same directory as Cancer.

2. Go to that directory in your command line (terminal)

3. Run the following command:

   ffmpeg -i Cancer.mp4 -f srt -i Cancer.srt -codec copy -c:s mov_text Cancer-subbed.mp4
   

   (If your files have different names, make sure to update the command appropriately.)

4. When watching Cancer in your favorite media player, turn on captions.

And that's all there is. I hope this helps someone. Enjoy.