The signifier, or the material form is what we can see, smell, touch, hear and taste. The signified is the mental concept. How does it work in sign language, when we describe the signified?
Naturally, it’s different for everyone when we envision mental concepts when we use sign language. I set out to discover how it looks like to me as a Deaf person.
Working in Adobe After Effects, I used simple lines to trace the important parts of my hands to mimic features of what I am describing.
For example, in the far left side of the video, for the “MOON” sign, my hand is formed in a crescent shape, rising up above my head. In another part of the video, at the top, for the “SUN” sign, my hands form a circle and then my fingers spread out to depict light coming from that circle.
After I finished the project and had my critique with people who are hearing, the feedback I got was interesting. Some people thought it was a sort of story board, while some people was able to guess the words for each sign and said they felt they could understand the signs even though they did not know any sign language. This is something I probably would expand on one day!
