Crowdsourced Close Captioning

One of the goals when making this film has been to be able to disseminate the information we’ve uncovered far and wide. While international distribution of the film is our hope and goal, it is yet to be foreseen if or when the film will get picked up for international distribution. So our backup plan is to prepare the film for as many various international territories as we can, so when the film finds a home on the various online film distribution stores, we can offer multiple languages, thus reaching a much wider, diverse audience. Additionally, when putting a film into any of the various online stores, the FCC mandates that they are close captioned. Since the film is digital a viewer would click the CC button in the online video player and choose from a list of languages and voila, their language automatically appears at the bottom of the scene in realtime with the spoken words.

Translating transcripts into other languages for close captioning is typically time consuming and very expensive. Enter Facebook. The initial facebook page ( www.facebook.com/mercuryexposure  ) we set up mainly focused on the research we were discover during the making of the film. Over time we have accumulated over 2,500 friends who are interested in the mercury issue. We reached out and asked out FB friends if any of them were interested in helping us with the transcription process, making sure the captions were accurate and the timing was correct. We got an incredible response and had people offering to help out with 13 different languages !

With multiple files going back and forth, I’ve had to think how to go about managing such a large project. So I thought I would include that aspect in this post as well.

WORKFLOW

It will be infinitely easier to manipulate the caption file if you have software installed that reads the captions, thus making it easier to change