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The digital accessible cinema chain
Transcript
25 May 2014
Roberta: As a movie patron the amount of time and the technical detail that goes into making a movie can be lost on us as we enjoy popcorn and choc tops for two hours of escapism. To give us an insight into the complexity of movie making, and importantly making it accessible, I’d like to welcome Ally Woodford, Project Manager at Media Access Australia to the program. Welcome Ally.
Ally: Thanks Roberta.
Roberta: Now just to get an overall picture of how movie making happens, can you tell us who the stakeholders are in the cinema chain?
Ally: Sure. Essentially you have the producer, then the distributor, and then of course the exhibition or the cinemas as we know them. The producer it’s most often a studio, so the likes of Paramount and Warner Bros in Hollywood, but there are many, many more out there, lots of smaller independents who might make only one or two movies a year as opposed to the big Hollywood giants. For the distribution side of things sometimes the distributor is vertically integrated with the studio so it’s actually part of the same company. So Twentieth Century Fox may jointly produce and distribute the movie. Twentieth Century Fox don’t have their own cinemas though when it comes to the exhibition side of things. The cinema chains are completely separate to the previous two stakeholders, but they are essential because they provide the connection with the audience.
Roberta: Ally, out of all the stakeholders, and there are quite a few, when it comes to the accessibility of movies is there one of them that has sole responsibility for providing captions and audio description?
Ally: Well they all have a hand in it. For our big Hollywood movies it’s often standard. It’s a blanket acknowledgement from the studios that they will make their movies accessible these days. It really does come down to the distributor though in terms of physical creation of captions and audio description. A distributor’s role, it is a massive one outside of accessibility as well. It receives the movie in its base edited form from the producer, it’s then their task to not only finalise it for distribution across all of the world of different movie regions, and that can entail dubbing it into foreign languages, or providing foreign language subtitles, as well of course captions and audio description. They then finally arrange for the movie to go to the exhibitors. And in that process one of the last steps the movie goes through is the production of the access features. It’s pretty much the last thing that happens before it goes off to the cinemas.
Roberta: So once a movie has captions and audio description on it does the distributor make sure that those features get played on the cinema screens?
Ally: No. While the distributor arranges contracts with all the different exhibitors around the world, the actual utilisation of any access features that’s on a movie it’s not part of any of those licensing agreements. The licensing agreement can cover a range of things such as the number of times that movie should play during a window of different dates, the arrangements might cover the box office, well they always cover the box office arrangements in terms of how much the distributor gets and how much the exhibitor gets. But the transmitting of the access features it’s not part of this.
Roberta: So I assume then it’s solely down to the exhibitor, is that it?
Ally: That’s correct. The exhibitors, you could say they’re at the coalface of accessible cinema. While they’re presented with an end product they have no control over whether that product has captions or audio description, but if it does it’s their choice in a sense to transmit those features to the public. It’s not simply though a case of just transmitting them. The cinema itself needs to have equipment for patrons to receive the features. So namely with the captioning it’s a viewing device, and for audio description it’s a radio receiver. On top of this if the cinema does have these devices, it’s more than likely that not every screen in the cinema complex will have the software to receive the features. It gets complicated now. So this can also affect the ability to transmit access features dependent on which auditorium the movie is scheduled to appear in.
Roberta: So it comes down to the scheduling of a movie that a cinema creates as to whether captions and audio descriptions will appear I suppose?
Ally: Yeah. In a word, yes. Cinema that has access equipment installed it may program a movie’s opening week in a particular auditorium and that auditorium will be able to receive the access features. But the following week when the box office, the people that are attending that movie might drop down in terms of attendance, the cinema might move that movie to a smaller auditorium and by chance that auditorium doesn’t have access features installed. So that can happen that patrons miss out from one week to the next over a movie’s season.
Roberta: Well to find out more about access to movies and other media, visit the Media Access Australia website, mediaaccess.org.au, or you can call the office with any questions, 02 9212 6242. And I thank you Ally for all of that today.
Ally: Thank you Roberta.
Roberta: I’ve been speaking with Ally Woodford, Project Manager at Media Access Australia, and Media Access Australia are supporters of this program.