How D-Facto Motion Tackled 162 Episodes of Audio Description
It was so straightforward. I have to say, I really enjoyed it.
Hello Wolfgang, please introduce yourself briefly.
I am Wolfgang Liebig, Editorial Director at D-Facto Motion. We are a post-production company and work on many German-language productions. We are actually involved from the end of the last day of shooting and support the entire production process until the finished film. What sets us apart from other production houses is that at some point we said to ourselves, “Hey, the topic of accessibility isn’t something that just falls by the wayside and others do for us, and we have to wait for it; instead, we take it on ourselves.”
And that’s why we’ve built a dedicated editorial team within D-Facto Motion. This team is explicitly part of the overall team. Permanent authors write audio descriptions and SDH directly in the ongoing post-production process because we get access to the material early.
Which tools did you use before Frazier?
Before we switched, we had few permanent authors. They were simultaneously trained for writing audio descriptions and SDH and accordingly wrote the texts in EZTitles. And the external contractors we hired usually wrote very classically in Word. However, some actually used a free version of EZTitles because it was apparently one of the few freely available players that showed a timecode.
How did the collaboration work?
I’m not entirely sure if you had a chance to collaborate smartly in EZTitles. There was no comment function either. We then classically shared Word documents and added comments there.
Internally, that might have worked well. But with external colleagues, you never knew if you would get a document back that worked. Are there comments in it that I need to implement? Do I have changes that I should accept? The potential to mess up each other’s documents was quite real.
It was always a bit of a grab bag, because you didn't know if you'd get a document back that worked, or if you'd have to reread everything completely afterward.
Why did you switch to Frazier?
We had a cool workflow in EZTitles that worked well. The crucial point, however, was that we expanded our team. New colleagues joined who were unfamiliar with EZTitles. And at the same time, ZDF signaled that they would be happy if we used a platform where truly collaborative work could be done. And that platform was meant to be Frazier.
Does the collaboration work?
I upload the video once, send an invitation to the team, and that’s it. All questions regarding file access, video distribution, or proofreading are suddenly solved. It’s such a matter of course, it really makes it much easier for me. No matter which of us prepares a project, they only have to deal with the files once, then it’s done. And that makes collaboration much, much, much, much, much easier.
Do you have a specific project that shows what that means in practice?
We had the daily soap “Frieda mit Feuer und Flamme” with 162 episodes. We knew from the start that the production schedule was very tight. This meant we had to start during the picture lock and assembled a large external team of authors, whom we continuously supplied with material. Each episode came in, the authors were invited, the next episode came, the next ones joined. And it just ran through.
The proofreading ran internally in parallel. The planning effort was large, but the effort to implement it in practice… Even when everything turned out differently and we had more time, our process was so cleanly planned and easily implementable that the text work could smoothly follow the urgent schedule. It really was a good time.