The Agony & The Ecstasy

Karma isn’t your typical video production company.  They do everything from creating social media and branded content for agencies, brands and broadcasters to live streaming and broadcast production using their in-house facility and their own crew.  They’re progressive and self-sufficient with a client list that spans broadcasters like BBC, ITV and Sky Arts to brands including Land Rover, Adidas and the Royal Albert Hall.

With such a wide service offering, on the few occasions that Karma turns to outside providers to support their projects, they look for companies that can respond quickly and meet their exacting quality standards – like Take 1.

Transcriptions and post-production scripts for

“The Agony and the Ecstasy.”

The first project that Karma worked on with Take 1 was a series of 3 x 60-minute documentaries and a 90-minute compilation programme for Sky Arts.  “The Agony and the Ecstasy” explored the rave revolution through shared experiences of over 40 musicians and was produced within a gruelling 16-week commission-to-delivery timeline.

Karma interviewed 53 key rave-culture figures for the series and one of their challenges was to identify themes within the rushes before going into post-production.  They enlisted Take 1 to transcribe their 2250 minutes of interview footage so that producers would be able to search for key words and identify storylines from their desks and cut down on the amount of time spent going through rushes during the edit.

The production team sent anywhere from one to twenty interviews to Take 1 at a time (depending on their shoot schedule) via Take 1’s secure web uploader.  At Take 1, these proxy files were then transcoded and encrypted before being assigned to the transcription team who used Take 1’s XML-based metadata platform, Liberty, to create the transcription data and deliver these directly to the client via email.  Transcriptions were turned around between 24 hours and three days after receipt, depending on Karma’s specific requirements for each batch of interviews.

In addition to the interview transcriptions, Take 1 also provided the final post-production scripts for programme delivery to Sky Arts.  The TX02 Master file format that Sky requested is a common layout used both in the UK and in the States that contains timecode, dialogue, visual event logs and credit programme information.  Take 1 used the XML transcriptions in Liberty to automatically render the transcription data into the TX02 master format for delivery.

Translating Twitch’s Mission Impossible promotion

More recently, Karma were approached by the live streaming  platform, Twitch, to create multi-lingual videos promoting the launch of the latest Mission Impossible movie for Paramount Pictures.  These 2hr, as-live transmissions featured five gamers from different countries doing indoor skydiving while playing games, intercut with interviews and vox pops. Paramount staggered the release of the videos on Twitch to coincide with the film’s premiere in England, France, Germany, Brazil and South Korea.

Karma relied on Take 1 to translate the interview footage for each of the five language videos and provide English transcriptions to inform the edit. Once the edits were complete, Take 1 also translated the final content and provided English subtitles for streaming on Twitch.  All within the space of one week.

Why Karma keep coming back

“The Take 1 team are super people,” says Pete Baron, head of production at Karma Group.  “Other than their overall professionalism and speedy delivery, they’ve got some very clever ideas to make production easier and we enjoy working with them.”

Take 1’s commercial manager, Claire Brown sums up with “In the relatively short space of time that Karma Productions have been a Take 1 client, they have successfully used three of the company’s core services – pre-edit transcription, post-production scripts and translations – – on a variety of different content for delivery across a range of platforms.  We’re proud to have measured up to their high standards on every project.”