I’ve been making my small talk videos for quite a while now and I always want to improve the way that I make them, both for myself and my audience. One of the things that I really want to do is to make them more accessible in terms of subtitles/captions. My friend Purple Ella suggested that I did this a while back, and I thought, “yeah I would really like to do this as it’s a great idea” but unfortunately with everything that has been going on with the world, I just didn’t have time to look into it. Then recently Jamie, of Jamie and Lion fame, wanted to show one of my videos but a captioned version. Unfortunately I didn’t have this at the time, but it made me want to subtitle my videos even more. Jamie was even kind enough to suggest options and request companies that will do this for a fee and I thank him once again for his help.
Subtitling/captioning videos is very important as it allows people who are deaf/hard of hearing and also people with different levels of focus to enjoy and be included in videos. Whenever I make a video I always want as many people to be able to view and understand it as possible. Also subtitling a video means that it can be watched and understood in places where you would not be able to use sound. I often watch subtitled videos at home whilst my wife is reading so as not to disturb her concentration.
There seems to be many ways in which you can subtitle a video. One of the easiest ways is to upload to YouTube which has options for captioning. However, YouTube is not a platform that I use for sharing my content. My “Small Talk” videos were always meant to be short, 2-minute 20-second videos that I could just upload onto the social media platforms I use, mainly Twitter, along with my website. Therefore I’m only looking to transcribe a couple of minutes worth of dialogue. Companies online offer various services that do this and I’ve been investigating them for the last couple of weeks. Most of them provide a service where you can pay per minute and it varies in price, with the captioned video being returned in 24 hours. I’m a little bit of a control freak when it comes to making my content and I like to be able to do things for myself. Plus I would need to be more organised on how I make videos. Sometimes they are uploaded immediately after finished as I am rushing to get them out at a regular time. The thought of having to get more organised and send something out 24-hours for captioning prior to uploading, and with my executive functioning the way it is, would probably put more pressure on myself.
Now I’m not saying I wouldn’t use these services. If I was producing a longer video, say 15 minutes to half an hour or more than I most likely would. However, for my short two minute videos I began to think “could I do this myself? They’re only short videos, how long would it take for me to actually transcribe them? Are there any sort of shortcuts I can do to speed this up?”
So that’s what I’m doing at the moment. I’m actually looking into ways that I can subtitle my own videos. After researching online, it’s not too difficult to produce subtitle text files in a very simple format which would just display a line of text at a certain time in a video. My time is very short so I am currently looking at ways to speed this up such as using voice recording to text. Eventually I want to create a work flow to see if I can get this to be 15 to 20 mins maximum. If it does become too time consuming then I will revisit looking at external services.
I have also done some research on subtitling and the subject of conversation flow, with regards to techniques such as lip reading that people use. It has also made me think that my videos can be a bit “awkward” at times with too many “erms” and filler words. I do try my best to avoid such things but they creep in. There is a lot of editing in post production also and I can see how this could be distracting too. The outcome of this is I want to also try some new filming techniques such as using telepromptor programmes to read my videos to improve word flow. However I also don’t want my videos to seem “unnatural” so I need to experiment to get the balance right. A lot of these, hopefully improvements, will be in development over the next month, so if I do not get a blog or video out, rest assured I am working on this which has actually become an exciting side project on it’s own.
Purple Ella’s excellent content is found across multiple platforms online, especially Youtube. Check out her website http://www.purpleella.com to find out more .
Jamie writes regular blogs at https://spacedoutandsmiling.com/ as well as co-presenting the awesome “1800 Seconds on Autism” podcast which can be found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06sdq0x
Both are excellent autistic resources to check out!