The Captioning Studio is proud to offer venues and production companies its theatre captioning technology.
Our theatre captioning service, which we call ‘GoTheatrical’, offers open and closed captioning options.
For open captioning, we recommend that venues use plasma/LCD screens for caption display.
We believe these screens have the following advantages over LED screens which are being used in some USA and UK venues:
- Inexpensive to purchase or hire. Readily available from local suppliers.
- Lightweight, easy to transport
- Allow for display of multiple coloured texts (colours specifically selected for ease of reading)
- Allow for up to 8 lines of text on screen, as opposed to just 3 with the old LED screens
- Coloured texts mean it is not necessary to preface dialogue with character names every time an actor speaks; for example, in scenes where there are only two characters on stage, there is no need to preface with character names every time they speak as colour change makes differentiation between actors’ lines very clear
- Allow for positioning of captions on screen to correspond with where the actors are located on stage, making characters’ lines easy to identify
- Allow for display of italicised texts and musical notes, making song lyrics and sound effect descriptions easy to identify
- Allow for up to 37 characters on a line, as opposed to only 32 with the old LED screens
- Allow for captions to be cued phrase by phrase, pop-up style, as opposed to smooth scrolling so patrons don’t lose their place in the captions.
- Allow for more precise timing of the captions being cued to screen
- Glare issues minimised as plasma/LCD screens allow for contrast ratios/brightness levels to be set to low and can be fitted with an inexpensive piece of sheer black cloth (completely invisible to the audience) that blocks out all glare during non-captioned segments of performances.
- Permit the display of accented letters on screen, so languages other than English can be displayed accurately. This is not possible with the old LED screens.
For our closed captioning, we launched back in 2010 our GoTheatrical app, available from the App Store and GooglePlay, enabling patrons to access captions on mobile phones or tablet devices. Specifically designed for theatre lighting conditions, patrons seated nearby are not distracted by the technology.
There are, in fact, quite a few venues in Australia that are offering their audiences both open and closed captioning simultaneously at all captioned performances, giving patrons the choice of either sitting in the auditorium in specific seats with a view of the open caption screen/s, or sitting up in the balconies and access captions on mobile or tablet devices.
For more information on our theatre captioning service, please contact us at info@captioningstudio.com