InSight Cinema: Bringing Captioned Movies to a Theater Near
You
by Kim Barron, SIGNews Staff Writer
Thirteen years after the passage
of the Americans with Disabilities Act, leaps and bounds of progress
have been made in creating accessibility for the deaf and hard of
hearing community in most aspects of life. However, there are still
areas that are not completely accessible, and one of them is captioning
in movie theaters.
There is a national organization based in California dedicated to
broadening the movie theater experience for deaf and hard of hearing
people. InSight Cinema has established a relationship with major
studios and all major theater chains in distributing open-captioned
films. This partnership includes more than 200 theater programs in
more than 500 cities in the United States.
Originally founded as Tripod Captioned Films, this was operated
by an educational program, TRIPOD in Burbank, CA. After the Burbank
Unified School System took over, InSight became its offspring. Funded
partially by a percentage of ticket sales (on open-captioned films),
sponsors and donations, InSight is operated with Nanci Linke-Ellis
at its helm as executive director, with a staff of five people.
Said Linke-Ellis, “Captioning is my passion. With video IPods
and PDAs, we’ve only scratched the surface of technologies
yet to be developed. The one thing that will never change is the
audience need.”
Other than open captioned
films, InSight’s major activities
include promoting, advertising, outreach and increasing awareness
about any live theater, museum exhibits, lectures, concerts for performances
that are captioned. InSight also works closely with several companies
on new digital captioning technologies that will increase the number
of captioned films available to deaf and hard of hearing people.
There are certain criteria that are followed in order for a particular
city to get a certain movie, such as approval from both the theaters
and studios and the projected success of the film. Attendance numbers
also impact the geographic locations where certain movies will play.
The top 50 cities get every film; they are shipped to other cities
to save transportation costs. This affects the dates of the showings.
While the film-booking
process is simple, there continues to be resistance from the studios
and movie theaters. Some studios ask for digital films (as opposed
to the traditional 33mm prints used for open captioned films and
do not want to create additional films.) “The
deaf and hard of hearing look at an audience of 75 people and think ‘gee,
isn’t this great,’ but the theater manager looks at the
empty 125 seats and wonders where everybody is?” commented
Linke-Ellis.
In Linke-Ellis’ opinion, the attendance numbers have become
sparse due to the audience being spread out over too many films. “The
average (hearing) moviegoer attends four to six films a year, not
25,” added Linke-Ellis, asserting that time needs to be spent
on attracting and expanding the audience. “InSight has put
significant energy and focus on finding ways to promote outside the
box,” stated Linke-Ellis. Efforts have been put into including
groups that may not fall in the deaf and hard of hearing community,
such as ESL or literacy groups who could also benefit from captioned
films.
Persons who would like
to bring more open captioned films to their location or support
InSight’s endeavors can find more information
at www.insightcinema.org
Reprinted with permission.
This article appeared in SIGNews’ March
2006 issue. www.signews.org
