A Project Proposal: Lipreading and Subtitling Silents

[herbertfilby]

Silent films have inter-titles, of course, but those inter-titles don't always match up with what the actors were saying.

For example, in Buster Keaton's film "My Wife's Relations" where the inter-title states "Papa! Shut your eyes and look what I brought home for dinner!" according to the book "Buster Keaton Remembered" by Eleanor Keaton and Jeffrey Vance (page 91), the actress Kate Price actually was quoted as saying: "Dinner my ass! Look what I married!"

I am in the process of creating a community-centric website (like Wikipedia) whose goal is to analyze silent films available in the public domain and write subtitles for these films by lipreading what the actors were actually saying during the film.

Here is a trailer I created to demonstrate what I am talking about:
(Most of this is going to be subjective, of course. There are many people out there that are MUCH better at lipreading than I am!)


The website itself needs a lot of work, and I need to custom-program a way to upload subtitle files and a user-rating system with commenting to make the experience wholly interactive.

I am considering putting this up on Kickstarter.com, but I want to get some opinions from silent film buffs to see if:

- Is this project worth doing?
- Is this project possible?

To accurately lip-read what they were saying, you need to slow the film down about half-time due to most silent film's under-cranking that sped up the actors' motions.

The films themselves can be found on Archive.org, but their file quality and resolution is abysmal... But it's the only place I can think of to find free, public domain footage of these silents, other than getting permission to host the High-Def files themselves, which would cost a fortune in royalties and hosting.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Let me know if you think this is worth pursuing!

[Donald Binks]

This should be an interesting project.

From what I understand, some of the actual dialogue not heard is pretty rich - especially films like "What Price Glory" - that is, if all the rumours are true!

[Jim Roots]

Nobody's going to stop you.


Jim

[jheez]

Fascinating project. I'd be interested in results, if only a few films were done. I'd help if I had absolutely any lipreading skill at all.