Cinema is a major component of popular culture, fodder for water cooler conversations everywhere. Despite all this banter around the latest Spiderman sequel, rarely will you hear anyone ask the question: “how, then, can the visually impaired participate more fully in this common culture that is predominantly visual?”, but the people behind the National Broadcast Reading Service of Canada have already answered it. In addition to creating more detailed audio broadcasts of news items, their AudioVision division has been producing what they call “described movies” since 1995. These movies are regular movies in every aspect except for their specially augmented soundtracks. Many scenes in movies may rely entirely on visuals, and in described movies a voiceover accompanies sections where the original audio does not reveal all the details of a scene, to make things clearer for the vision impaired.
This idea of enhancement through additional audio has a wonderful benefit in the case of described movies, as it permits a segment of the population that may not otherwise be able to fully follow a movie to do so. The idea behind creating enhanced movies is a close cousin to the kind of enhancement that foley provides. Foley artists, which have been around since radio plays, create sound effects manually, when recording the real thing doesn’t sound quite “real” enough. Picture someone clapping coconut shells on a piece of wood to make the sound that a horses’ hooves would produce, and you have a slightly clichéd idea of what foley art is like.
Foley effects made radio plays more believeable and real, and permitted some suspension of disbelief. Foley art is still employed in today’s films, to create some of the “real” sounds that we are used to hearing in a cinematic experience. In essence, described movies employ a kind of verbal foley, to make movies more accessible and believeable to the vision impaired.
New projects, like Call of the Wild and [murmur] use voice to tell a story over cellphones and perhaps these projects are, in a sense, another type of verbal foley. They create a scene and illustrate details that we might not see. Though the technology has come a long way, and now site-specific experiences are being delivered on mobile devices, some ideas can still be traced back to radio, and in the case of the cellphone-driven projects I just mentioned, are not really that far from radio at all.
2 replies on “Tell Me a Movie”
I’ve dealt with Descriptive Audio a bit, working in TV- it’s a bit of a headache for us broadcasters, as every signal path now has to have at least 3 channels, left right and DA. We currently broadcast the DA on the SAP (secondary audio program) channel- whenever you put something on SAP, you find out just how many of your viewers have accidentally turned on SAP. All over the world, I assure you, people are sitting in their living rooms, wondering why the narrator is describing the obvious. The interesting thing is how technolgies developed for the disabled are incorpaorted into the mainstream- talking books being the best-known example. Closed captioning gets all kinds of use too, from TVs in bars with the sound off, to devices sold to Christians that detect bad words in the CC stream, and mute the audio to preserve sensitive ears.
I enjoy the descriptive video service on shows (like The Simpsons) while I’m knitting. Obviously, I don’t need to look up while the show is on, and the DVS reads out all the street signs and blackboards that only appear for a second or two.
The one thing that I’ve wondered about SAP is that my TV won’t keep it on as a default. And, the setting is only accessible through on-screen menus. I’ve wondered how someone with low or no vision would even be able to find it. Joe Clark – "The King of Closed Captions" not the politician – once told me about how Rogers has the SAP setting as a button on the remote.