Runic Films Willing to Caption, But...

Yesterday, Caption Action 2 contacted the producers of a children's web series, eScape. The premise of eScape is given in a press release: "eScape tells the story of a group of campers seemingly abandoned by their counselors. They soon discover they are trapped within a video game that grants them amazing abilities. But in the real world, this game is the object of a power struggle between powerful corporations and mysterious military interests."

Today, Caption Action 2 received an email from Ben Alpi (ben@runicfilms.com), director and producer of eScape. Mr. Alpi's response shows a real willingness to caption, except for one problem:

"At present we don't have closed captioning (one of the few downsides with the Vimeo player) but we do plan to do it as soon as we're able (even if we have to post on YouTube or create a special version of the video.) We're currently on the search for volunteers for that and to do subtitles for as many languages as we can. The last series I worked on, Star Trek: Phase II we had several languages. We've been so busy getting the series out on schedule though, it may be some weeks until we're up and running with CC.

By the way, if you would like to urge Vimeo in this area, I'd certainly be for it. It's been a request for at least 3 years."

Checking Vimeo's site, apparently Mr. Alpi's correct. In the FAQ on closed captioning, it says:

"Vimeo does not currently support the use of separate closed captioning text files. If you want any kind of text to appear in your video, including closed captioning, it needs to be added to the actual video, like any other graphics.

We hope to have time to develop proper support for closed captioning soon."

Vimeo does have captioned videos, but the captioning is embedded as open captions, not closed captions. Below is an example found on Vimeo when we used the captioning keyword:

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