Friday 27 February 2009

Subtitle Movie Fun

We often forget just how much communicative meaning comes from visual clues rather than linguistic information. This site is a great one for reminding students of just how much of the communicative message they can pick up just by using their eyes. It's also a lot of fun, particularly for anyone like me who likes Indian movies.

The site is called BombayTV and it has a collection of Indian film clips. Each is quite short and has space for you to add 3 lines of subtitles. You can select from a range of clips then add the subtitles and then either send it to a friend, get a URL or best of all, get an embed code to add it to your blog.

Here's one I created.



It's really easy to do, just go to BombayTV and click on 'Make a Movie'.
You should then see the movie player with the movie index. Select a movie and watch it in the player, then write your subtitles in the fields at the side.


Once you have done this you can send it to yourself to get the URL. After sending it you will also see a text to click to get the embed code and you can copy and past this into a blog.
You can choose whether you get your students to guess what they think the characters are really say or just make up some dialogue of their own. Hope you have some fun with this, and if you enjoy it, then you also check out BombayTV2 which allows you to select a number of scenes and build a sequence, of Futebol TV which has clips of football matches and your students can type in commentary.

I owe a big thank you Özge Karaoğlu as I first spotted BombayTV over at her blog on the BBC | British Council Teaching English website. Where she is writing about technology in ELT.

Thanks Özge Karaoğlu .

Related links:Best

Nik Peachey

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