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, now VITAC.
Transcription and Post-Production Scripts for ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’
The first project that Karma worked on with VITAC was a series of 3×60-minute documentaries and a 90-minute compilation program for Sky Arts. “The Agony and the Ecstasy” explored the rave revolution through shared experiences of more than 40 musicians and was produced within a grueling 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 VITAC to transcribe their 2,250 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 20 interviews to VITAC at a time, depending on their shoot schedule. These proxy files were then transcoded and encrypted before being assigned to the transcription team to create the transcription data and deliver these directly to the client. 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, VITAC also provided the final post-production scripts for program delivery to Sky Arts. The TX02 Master file format that Sky requested is a common layout used both in the UK and in the US that contains timecode, dialogue, visual event logs, and credit program information. VITAC used the XML transcriptions 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 multilingual videos promoting the launch of the latest “Mission Impossible” movie for Paramount Pictures. These two-hour, 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 VITAC 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, we also translated the final content and provided English subtitles for streaming on Twitch. All within the space of one week.
Why Karma Keeps Coming Back
“The [VITAC] 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.”
Claire Brown, VITAC’s Vice President of Sales, said: “In the relatively short space of time that Karma Productions have been a client, they have successfully used three of our 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.