Citizen Jones

When Cris Cardenas took the job as post-production supervisor at Citizen Jones in 2018 the film company had just started producing programming for television audiences.  The team was adjusting to working with the high volume of content typical in documentary and reality programming and it was up to Cris to help them find suppliers and devise workflows that would allow them to maintain their creative standards at scale.

It soon became clear to Cris that the company’s current transcription providers wouldn’t be able to cope with the volume of work and turnaround times required to meet Citizen Jones’ TV deliverables. But speed wasn’t the only criteria for choosing a new provider, as Cris explains, “Quality is extremely important to us.  If, for example, a host’s name is misspelled or there are errors, our clips are no longer searchable, and the transcription becomes a little null for our post department. A big motivator in our search was to find a company that could provide fast turnaround, but one that also provides good quality.”

Having worked with Take 1 in his previous role at Vice Media, Cris was confident that the transcription provider could meet Citizen Jones’ quantity and quality requirements. Take 1 has a heritage of twenty years in the broadcast industry and combines a human workforce with underlying technology to provide highly-accurate transcripts.  With offices in the UK, Chile and the US, and an international team of transcribers, the company can provide transcriptions in record time with their “type while you sleep” overnight service as well as offering a more cost-effective 3-day turnaround for less urgent projects.  And Take 1 can also deliver transcriptions as structured, searchable data that can be applied throughout the production process to speed up workflows.

“We often have multiple shows in production at the same time and can shoot for 6 weeks straight on one show, but we start prepping the content as soon as the footage comes in,” continues Cris.  “The story producers and exec producers dive in way before the edit to plan and flesh out the story, and by the time we get into post we use the transcripts for Scriptsync – to shuffle through soundbites and find key words.  Transcriptions are an important part of our process from production to post.”

Citizen Jones has relied exclusively on Take 1 for pre-edit transcriptions since April 2018 for all their television production work, including shows like “The Redemption Project,” “Ashlee and Evan” and “T-Pain’s School of Business.” Additional factors that contributed to Take 1 winning this contract, and retaining it for so long, include the company’s approach to workflow management and security,  “Take 1 helps streamline our workflows and has forms, receipts and workflow management tools that provide real accountability on both sides,” concludes Cris.  “The Take 1 Cloud will make our process even more streamlined and provide the security credentials that broadcasters and content distributors like Netflix demand.  We’re excited to see it roll out, but we’re also really happy with the current process.”

Get in touch to find out how Take 1 can help your team deliver great quality at scale.