Captioning files availability and legality

jtweigandt

Well-Known Member
Our next production (Elf) we will have one night with an ASL interpreter. I just had a discussion with a retired friend (fellow veterinarian) who has been semi profoundly deaf for life.
She functions well with hearing aids and lip reading. She told me her favorite method at the movie theater is the reverse captioning on the back wall that you read off a piece of plexi.
Decidedly low tech and fairly easy to implement.... except... for a musical, someone would have to go through the libretto and make a series of cues for whatever device for an operator to trigger.
Dumb question of the day. Do the publishing houses have this available as a resource already, or if you roll your own is there any legal peril involved with scanning and converting to a useful format.

This would mean that we could serve a wider variety of patrons and do it at every showing without being intrusive.. anyone doing this already???
 
I can’t answer your question, but why would this be harder for a musical than a straight play?
 
I can’t answer your question, but why would this be harder for a musical than a straight play?
Only slightly harder to parse the script/libretto.. Much harder than a movie where it is synced to the actual movie itself ahead of time. But not wanting to re invent the wheel here, cant imagine it hasn't been at least tried somewhere.
 
I haven't heard of this being offered by any of the musical production houses. My guess is that the old guard publishers will say no, because that seems to be the only word they know. Some of the newer publishers might allow it and work with you.
 
The good news is that this is a technology that readily exists and is used extensively.... in Opera.... mostly outside of the U.S.

BUT....

Here's a great article from one of the best from our friends down in Sante Fe about a major upgrade to theirs in 2019.

https://www.santafeopera.org/company/press-news-media/new-els-system/

and these folks not to be confused with a popular tasty dinner side dish are the bee's knees at it just about everywhere else...

 
We would have to go decidedly low tech.... back wall display/ mirror device on gooseneck for the user like our local movie house.

Theirs fit in the cupholder.. I could certainly 3d print some sort of clamp on or plate/recepticle for the gooseneck.. either screwed to the seat back, or put on with 3M command strips.
Amazon has both ready made cell phone goose necks with clamp, and "raw" goosenecks.

I did just poke around this morning and found out that if you create an MS word document and use the proper paragraph formatting, and you can
import into powerpoint wholesale to make individual slides for each paragraph.. now we're getting somewhere.

I also found out that there exist HDMI mirror boxes that automatically will invert/mirror your display..

So in theory.. scan.. OCR.. parse to logical paragraphs.. import to powerpoint.. invert display..
I'm thinking large TV black background, large red lettering for contrast..

That would bring us down to a large TV, home made or adapted cupholder reflective device, used pc for power point, hdmi electronic mirroring device. I could see serving maybe a dozen patrons for not a whole lot of money.

Stay tuned... This dog in on a scent.. In the end bad optics if someone wanted to beat us up over the transcription.. Whadya mean we can't serve our hearing impaired?

I mean it's not like we're stealing Hamilton for a church.
 
I'm not sure if the movie theatre reflection thing will work with stage lighting. Worth a shot at least.

Supertitles are standard in Opera across the world. There is no reason you couldn't do it just for one show a run. You do have to have an operator run it. Usually its done in powerpoint, but there are softwares out there to just do this. You'll want someone on a conductor/director level to actually run it. They really need to know the show. In Opera its usually the asst. conductors job.
 
Just spitballing here in case the plexi option doesn't pan out... What about ProPresenter's Stage Display functionality, I know in previous versions you could use an iPod/iPhone over the network as an output device.

User could supply their own, or you could have a few devices in stock.
 
I mean it's not like we're stealing Hamilton for a church.
I'd watch that movie!

I used to play in an opera that dropped a screen just in front of their valence and masked off a projector so it just hit the sliver of exposed screen. Worked kind of like an upper 1/3 and they put the translations on it with a powerpoint. If it's just for a single night, I think an audience would be tolerant of that. Most people I know watch with captions on these days anyway, might be nice!
 
For one-offs we've used a large display next to the proscenium with text on a black background. It was pre-covid so the memory's fuzzy, but I think we had the AD or an understudy run it. I think for that one it was one long text doc that we slowly scrolled along with the show. Pretty low-tech but effective. Didn't hear any complaints.
 
The times I've seen this, it needed a body sitting down with the book/script and typing it into a program like Powerpoint or Slides
I'll also put in a plug for a program called Glypheo for Mac, which is basically a streamlined, text-only version specifically for sur-titles.
I hesitate to say it's good intern/student labor work, but the first pass certainly doesn't need to be somebody in/at tech.

I would not just use scan/print of the script. The human copyist is mostly important for making sure that the line breaks are rational and parseable, ie that you don't get 10 lines of text squeezed onto one slide, or if something is supposed to be a big surprise you don't give it away on screen 5 lines early because the text doesn't take a dramatic pause into account.
I've seen this get very bitty in the opera world- but the whole point of doing this is for intelligibility.
If you can't actually READ and UNDERSTAND the words on screen, then all the work is for nothing.

It's also fairly important to have a run through for the slide operator. (oh yeah, it probably needs a separate operator too) They'll need to make sure they know where all those important dramatic pauses come in.
 
More experiments. 3200 lumen projector on painted back wall. Seated about 1/3 back in 500 seat house. Gooseneck unit to hold plexi or really neat image if you just mount your own smartphone turned off. Gooseneck phone tablet holder with built in table clamp 19 bucks on Amazon. Our chair arms are tapered so I still need to build a simple adapter for our seating. But very encouraging so far. The reverser box for tv is out of production but the projector set for rear projection does it just fine
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More progress. 3d printed adapter for the gooseneck clamp. fits over the armrest and slides over the steel where our chairs connect for stability. And I have an office suite on my ipad that handles powerpoint files. I used the native dicatation on the ipad to create some slides, and did 10 pages of the libretto in about 20 minutes Each slide is a line or two of dialog. So much faster than typing.. I could have the script into powerpoint in a good 4 hours.. Not a bad investment. I will have to put together a demo for our board, but Gooseneck and 3d printed adapter are less than 25 bucks a seat, and the best reflector is the patron's own cell phone turned off.. or can rig the rectangle of plexi for them if that's their preference. But the device will be just drop in place over the armrest and adjust reflector to taste.. no fuss no muss.
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We did a play with captioning this past spring, and incorporated an RP screen into the design of the show. We made the decision that we did not want the audience to have to split their attention between the stage and the captioning (by putting it off to the side or above the stage)
 
We did a play with captioning this past spring, and incorporated an RP screen into the design of the show. We made the decision that we did not want the audience to have to split their attention between the stage and the captioning (by putting it off to the side or above the stage)
The thing I really like about the reverse reflected, is there's no distraction for the other patrons, and it's a proven model in the Movie industry already. Now I'm just down to figuring out the nuts and bolts.. and finally have a "drop in place" solution. KISS is always the best when we can achieve it.
 
When are you going into business selling this?
Not any time soon :) It's customized to our seats, and although there are probably lots of Theaters with the same brand seating, I'm sure there's more that are different. Measuring on site and making a wood mock up is a lot easier in person.
I would probably let just about anyone with the same seating have the 3d print file for a small donation to the theater, or maybe even just promise of a beer were we to ever be in the same city. And it's about a 20 hour print..
 

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