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| Demonic multitasking |
There’s also the brute physicality of uttering as many as 2000 words in 15 minutes, with the pace and breath placement dictated by someone else, someone who you can’t ask to slow down, because they’re more famous than you and also because that’s not how TVs work. A non-stop 15 minute soliloquy would be considered stern work for even the more hardened of avant-garde thespians. And I’ve already written about the nimble real-time curation of script fragments the news requires. And if your enunciation wanes with weariness, just watch Dragon’s recognition tumble, like dominoes kicked over by a confused dragon.
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| As loveable as it is frustrating. |
On top of which, being ready to create text, like, now, takes planning, work, and time – although while on the air, I’ll have neither time nor attention to spare. I have to train in new words, and retrain words which have come out wrong. I may have to write new autocorrect rules, either universal or context-specific (leads united=Leeds United can be safely universal, city=City should probably be football-exclusive). If it’s the news, I have to tidy the last session’s VTs and prepare the next session’s rundown. Needless to say, it can’t all be done at the start of the shift, as old news curdles like suspect dairy. If the whole program is going to be replayed at any point, I also have to tidy the whole thing afterwards, so next time it can be perfect (a pro-tip, therefore, for captions viewers is that repeat broadcasts of live shows may have much better captions). And I have to file the text for our records.
Don’t get me wrong – we do get to sit in a soundproof booth watching the news and talking back to it, and I love the work something fierce. But it means live captioning can’t be effectively accomplished in long, uninterrupted on-air slabs. As with transcontinental aviation, we require co-pilots.
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| Goggles sold separately. |
The exact rhythms vary, but most live captioning sessions are either 15 or 30 minutes long, depending on the degree of difficulty and accuracy required. 30 minutes is typical for live sport (which tends to be less taxing, for reasons I’ll explore in future posts) and for more heavily scripted news. 15 minutes is the norm for our more exacting and relentlessly live news programs. After that, the co-pilot takes the wheel, and you get ready for the next time you have to take it back. These sessions can go for up to two hours, with each captioner contributing an hour in total, before there’ll be a pause in scheduling for both of you, to be filled with admin, accuracy work, reviewing, training, and helping the offline department. A nine hour shift will ultimately usually involve about three hours live on the air.
Handing over control is tricky. You look to line it up with a convenient lull in conversation, but much of live television is designed to avoid such lulls in conversation like it’s on an over-caffeinated first date. If you look carefully, you might see the telltale signs of a handover at the 15 and 45 minute marks of a live program. It could be a missing line, a duplicate line, or a five second lapse in captions. You probably won’t catch it at the 30 or 60 minute marks, because these we line up with the end of segments and programs.
One advantage of this division of labour in news captioning is that you tend to cover the same content a few times. Captioner A at the top of the hour and half hour will get up close and personal with the headlines, the top stories, the rarely-changing priorities of the day, while captioner B will become intimately familiar with the weather forecast, which they’ll cover twice each hour, and with the more variable summary coverage of minor and local stories, and quirky end features. Captioner A has the benefit of a fresh rundown which they can tidy from the top, captioner B has to listen while tidying so they can keep track of what’s already gone – they’re editing a document which is also being whittled away towards obsolescence, in real-time – a task with considerable figurative heft if you like your stories with eagles eating livers, snakes eating tails, or stones rolling uphill.
Of course, the other role of a co-pilot is to render assistance in an emergency, or otherwise as they are able. Accordingly, if your computer is unexpectedly sucked into a watery deep by Cthulhu, someone is hopefully poised to seamlessly take over. The most entertaining instance of this I’ve encountered was when a captioner working from home had to relegate control as a highly venomous Australian spider marched across her keyboard.
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| Die. :) |
These things happen. More mundanely, a co-pilot has time to spell-check difficult and unexpected names, or to find unexpectedly reused scripts, and message them to the live captioner. Along with plenty of commentary and banter.
Still, it’s busy. Those 15 minute off-air windows are where all that prep has to fit. You just have to get into the rhythm.
Disclaimer.
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