Sign of the times

I was approached by the community safety charity 'I Am Me Scotland' to revisit a project I had worked on with them a couple of years ago. Due to the success of the pilot project in Renfrewshire 'I Am Me Scotland' is rolling out it's 'Keep Safe Card' scheme across Scotland. This meant there were some script changes, and a change of personnel meant that it was also an opportunity to re-record the main voice over, and add in a British Sign Language signer - particularly helpful given the intended user group for the card. I set up the interrotron device configured to a location autocue, with the new script scrolling at a nice steady pace, as the previous version had also been a little fast for BSL. We actually filmed this bit on the 'I Am Me Scotland' bus, so the set up is actually fairly portable. I recut the original film with Christopher Mckays narration and VO, and provided this in an audio format for Police Scotland signer, Stephanie Rose. With the timings agreed I was able to synch up the BSL autocue script with the spoken audio from Chris and each of our participants, which meant that Stephanie was able to provide picture synched BSL in one contiguous take, making editing really easy! Stephanie was filmed in front of a green screen in a light tight studio, and it was back to the edit suite. When I had done the first cut I was using FCP7 on a Mac, the last 18 months I've been using Adobe CC on a PC, but was able to open up the old project file and convert to an XML, which Premiere could open, with a few minor translation errors, making a re-cut fairly easy as well, by hooking up the old rushes drive. So a fairly technical wee project, but with a wee bit of forethought and planning I managed to pull all the threads together and turn around the project in a couple of days.