

Working with the presenters
Usually, when I’m directing someone to deliver the lines of a script I pay close attention to the words, making sure each word is actually said, focussing on where the emphasis is placed, considering the tone and pronunciation of each word. While I could almost manage that with the French speaker, and had a little bit of an idea what the Spanish speaker was saying, when it came to Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, Arabic…, I was at a complete loss. I just had to hope that the delivery was what I’d asked for and trust that the participants had included all the words. I have to say the participants were very patient with my lack of understanding of their language and very generously delivered the lines numerous times and then explained in English where they were placing the emphasis.
We needed a relatively straight delivery for most of the script. I asked people to speak clearly and to aim for a friendly, approachable tone. The one line where participants had the opportunity to be more expressive was in the final PTC which was the line “go and vote”. I encouraged each person to have a little fun with that line and the results were great. There was such a cultural variance in how each person delivered the line that back in the edit, once we had cut the 10 videos that we had been briefed to do, we decided to cut another video with just that line in all 10 languages. Take a look at the results here.
Timing was always going to be a challenge. Each video needed to be a minute or less, so that it could be uploaded to Instagram, this was fine in the English language version, however each language has its own pace, and a 10 second sentence in English can take 15 or 5 seconds in another language. In the studio, we dealt with this by encouraging each speaker to speak quickly and to move at pace through each section of the script. We also gave ourselves a bit of wiggle room at edit stage by incorporating some breathing space in the shots that didn’t involve either PTC or VO. In the end, we managed to get all the videos under a minute.
The final videos included on screen graphics and subtitles in each language. We worked closely with the Immigrant Council and their translators to ensure that the subtitles are correctly placed and that the graphics are linguistically correct. We hope that the final videos do justice to the languages that they are delivered in.
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