Filmmaker Annalise Ophelian used Transcriptive to vastly speed up production on her feature doc, Looking for Leia, by using A.I. transcripts. With over 100 interviews, Transcriptive made it possible to search and find footage and even edit using the transcript. You can read below about how she changed her team's workflow by using digital transcripts.
If you want to try out Transcriptive just download the Mac version or Windows version and it'll go into trial mode. You can also email us for a longer, unrestricted trial at sales@digitalanarchy. The SF Indie community can also save $100 until Dec. 14th by using coupon: SFINDIE and get it for $199 instead of $299 here
Annalise Ophelian started making feature-length documentaries in 2008, fueled by a desire to see more stories of under-represented communities on screen. Her work focuses on themes of representation and self-determination, giving voice to female protagonists and putting women in central story roles. “ I became a filmmaker in large part because of the magic I felt watching Star Wars. (...) For many of us, Star Wars was the first time we saw a female character holding her own on screen, and the first time we had permission to geek out on a genre previously reserved for boys,” explains Ophelian.
This early memory of self-empowerment directly inspired Annalise to produce her most recent film Looking for Leia, “a documentary about women who found identity, connection, and purpose in their love of the galaxy far, far away.” Now in post-production, the movie has generated over 100 interviews in a 14 month period of time, and quickly transcribing all this material quickly became a hard task to accomplish. That’s when Ophelian decided to incorporate Transcriptive into her documentary filmmaking workflow.
Transcription has been a big part of Ophelian’s routine since the very beginning of her career. The filmmaker is also a psychologist with a background in qualitative research and has spent many hours glued to her headset and foot pedal, manually transcribing both research and film interviews. “On my last documentary, I manually transcribed about half of my material and sent the remainder out to various professional transcription services. This was incredibly time consuming and expensive,” Ophelian recalls.
The transcription routine she had been dealing with for years was about to repeat itself in Looking for Leia when Ophelian decided to research automated solutions and found Transcriptive. According to her, the biggest advantage of Transcriptive in comparison with other AI transcription services was the integration with Adobe Premiere Pro. The integration allows her to transcribe, edit the transcripts, search content and generate captions inside of Premiere.
Ophelian started post-production on Looking for Leia in August 2018, and Transcriptive allowed her to generate roughly 1,000 pages of transcript over the past six months. “Using Transcriptive for Looking for Leia involved a fraction of the time and cost of previous projects. The turn around time of the AI software is amazing and having timecoded transcripts for all of my interview material means I’m getting to review all my footage. It makes it infinitely easier to find things by participant or subject,” says Ophelian.
Documentary filmmaking generates a lot of material, and incorporating new software into an already established production workflow is not always easy. Ophelian recognizes there was a learning curve before she could fully take advantage of Transcriptive’s automated transcription, search, and text editing tools. However, she guarantees that learning how to best incorporate Transcriptive into the Looking For Leia post-production workflow was time well spent.
In the beginning, Ophelian’s biggest challenge was to choose an export format that works best for her and the Looking For Leia team. “Once I was able to nail down a format that worked best for me I created two master documents: A Word doc with an interactive table of contents that allows me to search all of my interviews for keywords or phrases; and a Scrivener project where I plug these transcripts directly into a script template,” explains Ophelian.
In the beginning, Ophelian’s biggest challenge was to choose an export format that works best for her and the Looking For Leia team. “Once I was able to nail down a format that worked best for me I created two master documents: A Word doc with an interactive table of contents that allows me to search all of my interviews for keywords or phrases; and a Scrivener project where I plug these transcripts directly into a script template,” explains Ophelian.
Transcriptive offers two AI services inside of its Premiere Pro panel: Transcriptive AI and Speechmatics. Transcriptive A.I. averages 97% accuracy, is priced at $0.12/minute, and allows you to pay for the transcriptions as you go. Speechmatics is about 95% accurate and costs $0.07 per min. On the transcribing side, Ophelian has a tip for new users: “I learned that periods of non-dialog would produce long sections with single words on each line. These were easy to grab and clean up, and I generally exported an mp3 of the audio to use as a reference when doing transcript clean up so I didn’t have to comb through my proxies.”
It didn’t take long for the Looking for Leia team to get used to Transcriptive. Before the plugin, the transcription side of her post-production would often take 2 - 3 months. With Transcriptive, they were able to generate 60 interview transcripts in 6 working days, which allowed Ophelian to focus on the creative side of her filmmaking work. “Because Transcriptive is so efficient and budget-friendly, I have more time and money to devote to other aspects of post-production. Like all things in post, find a Transcriptive workflow that works for you. Do one or two transcripts to start with and experiment with the export format, figure out what works best for you. And the team at Digital Anarchy are great with answering questions,” Ophelian concludes.
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