Bad Lip-reading At The Rugby World Cup
A lip-syncing video of rugby players at the Rugby World Cup has been used to help raise awareness for a petition aiming to get more captions on television programmes for deaf and hard of hearing New Zealanders.
The video was produced by Ben Cochrane and Craig Farndale from marketing company The Business, for the New Zealand Captioning Working Group’s petition to parliament.
The video shows an array of rugby players from numerous teams speaking on the field with made up voiceovers.
Cochrane said he took inspiration from an NFL lip-reading video produced earlier this year.
Louise Carroll from the New Zealand Captioning Working Group says captioning in New Zealand lags behind other countries like the United Kingdom and the United States who have legislation requiring broadcasters to use captions on their programmes.
According to Ms Carroll currently the only news programme in New Zealand that has captioning is ONE News; some free to air channels have no captioning whatsover and no on demand television service offers captioning.
“We’ve been working for four years to get the government to give us legislation,” Ms Carroll told media.
“Deaf and hard of hearing New Zealanders need to be able to watch what they want, when they want and how they want – just like everyone else,” she said in a statement.
