Some information on HARBINGER from Brink Productions:

Brink Productions’
HARBINGER
by Matthew Whittet

It’s a rare and thrilling treat when contemporary, blood-soaked horror disgraces the stage, andHarbinger does just that. A tender ‘boy meets girl, girl eats boy’ love story caked in crimson humour, Harbinger by Matthew Whittet is as hilarious as it is unsettling. A nightmarish dreamscape and black comedy rolled into a rich theatrical brew. Think David Lynch meets Flight of the Conchords. Think Hitchcock meets True Blood. Think Freddy Krueger meets – actually, stop thinking and start preparing for what will be the funniest, juiciest, most disturbing theatre experience of 2010, or possibly even your life…

Aug 31 – Sept 11 (previews from 27 Aug)

Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre

BOOKINGS: bass.net.au | 131 246

Sat 4 Sept Live Captioning for matinee and evening performance

Thurs 9 Sept Pre-show briefing for visually impaired patrons

The machine-generated captions will initially be generated in English. At first they will only be found
on 13 channels including National Geographic, Columbia, as well as most Google and YouTube channels.

The software engineer behind the technology, Ken Harrenstien, is deaf.

Currently YouTube offers a manual captioning service but video makers tend not to use it.

“The majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me,” Mr
Harrenstien wrote in the Google blog. His solution combines automatic speech recognition with the current caption system.

The translation is not always perfect (in a demonstration the phrase “sim card” becomes “salmon” in
text), but Mr Harrenstien says that the technology “will continue to improve with time”.

Alternatively users can upload a transcript of their video and auto-timing algorithms will match the
text to the words as they are spoken.

Vint Cerf, vice president at Google, is widely recognised as a founding father of the internet. He is
also hard of hearing and has worn a hearing aid since the age of 13.

From 2009 all feature films financed by Screen Australia will be required to have caption costs included in their budgets. Currently, there are an estimated 4 million Australians who are vision and hearing impaired, and unable to enjoy the cinema due to limited access. A recent panel discussion presented by Screen Australia unravelled the mysteries of captioning, tapping into why making films accessible makes artistic and commercial sense. Sarah Tracton, award winning filmmaker and access advocate presented on the panel. She said, ‘Through this exciting initiative, filmmakers have the power to tap into new audiences, and ensure the cinema experience is equitable to all. As the film industry seeks to find new ways of attracting greater audiences in the face of competing emerging technologies, heightening accessibility through captioning and audio description is a way of filling unsold seats.” Representatives from Media Access Australia, Roadshow Entertainment, Atlab Operations and Vision Australia also contributed to the panel discussion.