NORTH HOLLYWOOD : Firm Puts Stock in Hiring Deaf Film Editors

Film & Video Stock Shots, a small North Hollywood company, is giving deaf and hearing-impaired film editors their own shot at making it in the entertainment industry.

The company assembles snippets of film and video used in movies, television and industrial films.

Stephanie Siebert, president, started hiring deaf and hard-of-hearing people at the beginning of this year as a challenge to herself and her industry. Siebert said she had never met a deaf or hearing-impaired person who worked in the entertainment business.

Since all the footage that Stock Shots provides for motion pictures is silent, editors don’t need to be able to hear.

“You have to set out to commit to hiring people with a specific need,” said Siebert, who went to the National Center on Deafness at Cal State Northridge and the Greater Los Angeles Assn. for the Deaf in search of potential employees.

Siebert made her office deaf-friendly by installing a Teletype machine and a smoke alarm that flashes a strobe light when it goes off as well as sounding a buzzer. She also put a closed-captioned television in the lunchroom.

All the hearing employees in the office, including Siebert, have taken one class in American Sign Language and plan to take a second one next month, she said. And everyone at the company tries to use signing as often as possible.

But just in case of a breakdown in communications, everybody in the office has an erasable board for writing down more complicated conversations.

Currently, the company has one hearing-impaired employee and two deaf employees. Over the past nine months, other employees with hearing impairments have gone on to become script writers and script readers.

“There are a lot of deaf and hard-of-hearing people interested in the (entertainment) industry,” Siebert said, “but they don’t have a good toehold on it.”

At Stock Shots, hearing-impaired employees are gradually trained to work in every aspect of the stock footage business, from filing film clips to finding the perfect shot a director has requested of a black Volvo exploding as it zooms off a cliff.

Debbie Kasaus, who is hard of hearing, has been working at Stock Shots for nine months. Her editing job, she said, is something she has dreamed of doing since college. A 1978 graduate of Cal State Northridge with a major in radio, television and film, this is Kasaus’ first job in the movie business.

“You don’t have to use sound. It’s very visual,” Kasaus said of film editing.

It can also involve editors in some strange projects. Kasaus said she recently edited footage of a live X-ray shot of food being digested for a music video by the rock group The Offspring.