Odd Job of the Day: Professional Closed Captioner

If you’ve ever watched television in the airport and wondered what it would be like to type all that dialogue plus the occasional [MUSIC PLAYS] or [SUSTAINED LAUGHTER] into the closed captioning service, today is your lucky day. Matt Seidel does freelance work for a captioning and transcription company and has written about it for The Morning News.

He does everything from conference calls to MOOCs to documentaries, but movies are his favorite:

More than other types of transcription work, movie captioning allows me to cultivate my own voice. I feel most creatively fulfilled filling in nonverbal sound effects. Any hack can nail an off-screen [DOORBELL], but it takes an artist to convey the full range of the human emotional experience. My signature is the multiple descriptor. I like [GASPS AND BLUBBERS] over colorless [SOBS], [GURGLING CATERWAULING] over tepid [WAILS], and [CACKLING GIBBERISH] over jejune [UNINTELLIGIBLE], a tag for which we have a shortcut key. I feel these florid touches set me apart from the horde of doorbell-catalogers I call colleagues.

And then there is that most enticing creative challenge, the love scene. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m a [MOANS] guy. However, depending on the mood and the character, I can be persuaded to throw in a [GRUNTS] or a [GROANS] in exigent circumstances. And I confess that, just once, I added a gratuitous [ULLULATES]. (In my defense, I had just done several episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess.) Generally, however, one should exercise maximum restraint. As such, I usually let the thunderous conclusions of love scenes pass without comment, with the exception of one tussle so histrionic that to deny its participants a [JOINT CLIMAXES] seemed downright petty.

Photo: Dsmous

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