“If you don’t have time to listen to podcasts, maybe you have time to read them!”

Let me introduce to you, a little project I setup few week ago, a blog where I am sharing transcripts of my favorite animation podcasts.

Why transcripts?

Podcasts have grown massively in the past 10 years and if you are not part of a high-end or animated feature online school, podcasts would be the next best thing to learn what goes on at top Feature Animation studios and hear about the workflow and techniques used in those studios.

Sadly, if you are new to the animation industry, there is no way you will be able to catch up with all the podcasts and fabulous interviews that have been recorded until now. The iAnimate podcast alone, has featured more than 75 guests accounting to more than 100 hours of episodes!!!

On top of this, most of the information shared got lost over the time as it is not possible to share specific parts of an interview, neither can you search or cross examine podcasts.

Transcripts on an other hand can be easily be indexed, searched, quoted. Wouldn’t you be interested to quickly Google search the thoughts of all the animators featured on podcasts and who worked on Hotel Transylvania or Toy Story 4 or How to train your dragon?

If you are into Speed reading, having transcripts of podcasts would allow you to quickly swallow up the whole internet!

Most importantly, if English is not your first language or you are just not fluent enough to understand podcasts, services like Google Translate would allow you to finally access that incredible wealth of information.

The Animation Transcripts Community is a free non-profit educational website aiming at making great animation material more accessible.

At the start of this endeavor, I was willing to pay for the services of outsource Transcript companies to write transcripts of only my most favorites interviews but then, I came across Otter.ai, an incredible app/website that automatically generates transcripts using Artificial Intelligence.

No, the results are not perfect, especially when dealing with animation specific terms. It is however a really great start for indexing podcasts and with the help of a community, we could eventually verify and correct and huge amount of A.I. transcripts. This is why I created, the Animation Transcripts Community or ATC, a community website where I would feature my favorite podcasts as transcripts and sometimes with show notes if I feel I need to highlight specific parts of the transcripts.

As explained, direct A.I. transcripts are great if you are in a hurry to share a specific part of an interview but not so great if you want to completely understand an interview so this is why I separated the transcripts in 3 levels of accuracy.

A one mic level of accuracy is a direct A.I. transcript.

A two mics level of accuracy is a first human review of the direct A.I. transcript. Some possible errors might have slipped and some confusing areas will be marked with several stars (***) but the transcript is already very good.

A three mics level of accuracy is the holy Grail. Several reviewers would have gone through and thumbed up the transcript. you don’t have to wait for a three mics transcript though, a two mics is already 95 percent accurate.

Head over to ATC to enjoy some great interviews and maybe become part of the team!