Shift_Happens

Written by Rob Colling Tuesday, 01 September 2009 10:09

Appearing at the Thinking Digital conference had a number of knock-on effects for internetsubtitling.com, the first and the most exquisitely badly behaved of which was that I ended up in the same room as Marcus Romer.

As well as being a director, producer and all-round theatre good guy, Marcus is artistic director at Pilot Theatre. Pilot is based at the York Theatre Royal, and specialises in pulling off all the challenging or crazy projects that furrow the brows of more mainstream theatres. It also organises Shift_Happens, a TED-style high-intensity conference which looks at the potential impact of digital and web technology on the arts.

Of course, when Marcus invited me to deliver a talk at the conference about captioning and accessibility, I was on my way to York practically before he’d finished his sentence.

Now, I’ve been a gigging musician for 20 years and never have I encountered a tech team as helpful and attentive as the gents of the Theatre Royal. In fact the entire Shift_Happens crew and management deserve the highest praise – it was a wonderfully friendly conference, yet one where every cog of the machine was impeccably well oiled and everything worked precisely to plan. An impressive balancing act.

In retrospect I can see that where Thinking Digital looks at what’s next, Shift_Happens looks at what’s going on now that you might not have noticed or thought of. Yes, it makes you go “whoa!” a lot, but then it also gives you lots of practical ideas to take home and act on.

I was determined to follow my own advice and monitor the Twitter feed over the course of my presentation. Accepted Twisdom was that I was a little heavy on the self-promotion at the start, so that’s something I can put right for next time.

Plenty has been said about the impact, meaning and implications of Shift_Happens 2.0, and rather than belatedly add to the collected wisdom at this point I shall simply point you towards the marvellous blogwork of Hannah Nicklin, Chris Unitt, Lyn Gardner, Bill Thompson, Ian Aspin and Bianca Winter.

As a nice postscript, last week’s good news is that Pilot have confirmed that more shift will be happening in 2010. By that time, of course, the world will have moved on a little and people will be doing new things. Some of those people will come back to Shift_Happens 3.0 and tell us about what they’ve been doing. A few of those projects may even have been inspired by the 2009 conference. Shift_Happens is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a positive feedback loop, and I can’t wait to see the shift that happens next.

Captions vs transcriptions

Written by Rob Colling Thursday, 27 August 2009 00:06

Yesterday I made a fairly standard approach to a potential client, asking whether they’d be interested in subtitles or captions for their video content. We’re talking about an organisation set up by the UK government, with many dozens of videos on their site, so I figured maybe they’d be interested. At worst I’d get one of the usual reasons for not wanting to talk to me – worldwide recession, not a priority, yada yada yada. But no, this time I heard a new one.

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