Angie Kim: Midterm Portfolio – #4 Audio Description
Project Description:
This is a project to audio describe and caption the trailer of a movie Perfect Days(2023) to explore audio describing techniques for people with hearing issues.
Documentation:
Full version with pausing and captions
Short version
(other versions can be found here, Couldn’t upload it directly because of copyrights and file size issues)
The reason to chose the video
I wanted to try with a video that has rapid scene switches and background music.
This was one of my favorite films of last year – and it was a very very calm film so I thought the trailer would be not too crowded with scenes (and I was wrong!).
Simple version
I tried to audio describe the video while keeping the original sound and video length. Although I managed to put some description it was not long enough to describe all the scenes, therefore lots of scenes were skipped to keep the length and the sound of the video. Also it was hard to describe who are the characters and how they look, also for the background environment as well. I can’t really understand what’s happening on the video solely by these captions.
Longer Version
This version has much more information than the shorter one. Although the lengths got more than 200% longer it helps people with lower vision to understand the scene and the situations of the video easier.
The methods that I took on the longer version video was from **Disability as Method: Interventions in the Habitus of Ableism through Media-Creation by Arseli Dokumaci.
The article provides an example and a better way to include more information on the video using pausing method, which is to provide more information than the dialog gaps and give more contexts about the visual scenes to people with lower vision.
You can read the full article here.
https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/6491/5095
The points that I concentrated the most were the part underneath.
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*In its traditional use, AD is often squeezed into dialogue gaps and forced to fit into sighted time. This shows how blindness time is made to become, as Rod Michalko writes, “a time for something other than itself,” obliged “to re-set its time to the ‘sighted watch’.” By adopting disability as method, I seek to reverse this order and let AD be a time for itself. I practice AD as a form of blind intervention in the following ways:*
1. *I freeze the first frame of each new shot, as well other frames within the same shot as visually significant changes occur.*
2. *I insert audio descriptions within the freeze-frames, thus giving them the time they need instead of the time of “audio gaps.”*
3. *Once the description is finished, I let the moving image ‘move’ until the next moment when description becomes necessary.*
4. *I describe the events right at the point they occur. If less important changes are going to take place, I add their descriptions to the prior stop-frame.*
5. *I add close-captions for the entire video, including the audio descriptions themselves so as to multiply blindness gain by “Deaf Gain” (Bauman and Murray).*
For my one exploration on top of their research, I choose to include the original soundtrack which was an overall background music of the original video and not having the music was creating another audio gap. The song was Lou Reed’s Perfect day.
For the comparison I’m uploading the version with original (trimmed) sound of the video only.
Transcript:
landscape of tokyo’s sunrise
a man wiping the street in the early morning
text reading “Mubi, Best international feature film 96th Academy Awards”
Closeup of the asian male character in his late 60s.
male character wakes up in the early morning in his simple room.
text reading “a film by wim wenders”
he waters the plants, get ready and pick up the keys to go to work.
His uniform says ‘the tokyo toilet’.
while driving, he plays the tape
he’s cleaning the new public toilets
text reading “a humane, hopeful embrace of everyday blessings by variety”
kids rushing out from the toilet making him surprised
“Now is Now” he says
“Now is Now” the young lady says
they are riding bicycles together.
text reading “Glorious, a true gem” by Next Best Picture.
A kitsch looking young lady seating in a passenger seats
a snapshots of his daily life with different people
text reading “rich and resonant” by the total film
text reading “Captivating” by the hollywood reporter
text reading “Magnificent” by AWARDWATCH
he’s laughing, crying and confused while being with different people
text reading “a poem of extraordinary subtlety and beauty” by VOX
He’s laughing while driving a truck
landscape of tokyo’s sunset
title “Perfect Days”
He close the door of his truck and came back home with a plant pot, dropping a key .
no pausing 2
landscape of tokyo’s sunrise
a man wiping the street in the early morning
Closeup of the asian male character in his late 60s.
male character wakes up in the early morning in his simple room.
he waters the plants, get ready and pick up the keys to go to work.
His uniform says ‘the tokyo toilet’.
while driving, he plays the tape
he’s cleaning the new public toilets
kids rushing out from the toilet making him surprised
“Now is Now” he says
“Now is Now” the young lady says
they are riding bicycles together.
A kitsch looking young lady seating in a passenger seats
a snapshots of his daily life with different people
he’s laughing, crying and confused while being with different people
He’s laughing while driving a truck
landscape of tokyo’s sunset
title “Perfect Days”
He close the door of his truck and came back home with a plant pot, dropping a key .
with pausing.
the landscape of tokyo during sunrise from a sky.
a man wiping the street of tokyo in the early morning, in front of an old two-story wooden house. text reading “MUBI” and switching to “official entry japan, Best international feature film” by 96th academy awards.
A closeup shot of a side of a japanese, asian male character’s face, who is the main character of this film.
He is waking up in the early morning before the full sunrise, opening his eyes and turning his head towards the ceiling.
He’s walking himself up, waters the over ten plant pots,
getting his blue jumpsuit uniform that says the toilet project,
talking his socks on the stair and stepping down the stair to pick up the keys. He opens the door while having a towel around his next and looks up the sky.
To go to work, he is driving a truck. he’s playing a cassette tape while driving.
His laughing face is shown on the back mirror of the truck.
Sun is rising between the buildings on the road that he’s driving. text reads “BFI london film festival official selection 2023, festivals of cannes best actor 2023, NYFF61 2023 official selection”
during the daytime, He’s cleaning three different public toilets in japan. they all look different but very new and artistic.
He tried to get in to another toilet to clean but there is a man peeing. He waits outside the entrance and peacefully smiling.
Trees are casting sunlights.
text reading “a humane, hopeful embrace of everyday blessings by variety”
two little kids are rushing out from the toilet making him surprised.
He’s looking at the back of the kids running to the playground, waiving his hand. he’s saying “Next time is next time” in japanese in the next scene.
“Now is now” he says. He’s seating next to a young, high school japanese girl.
The girl says “Now is Now”
They are riding bicycles together in sunset.
Scene switched and the man is looking confused while seating in the back of his truck, looking at a blonde short haired japanese lady wearing a pink, hipster jacket seating in the passenger seat.
Another scene, he is laughing with a man in his 40s laughing alongside a river.
Scene switched, Portraits two different ladies that he knows. they seem to have different stories and relationship with him.
Scene switched, He’s sitting in his room around the futon and opening the window, casting sunlight and enjoying the wind breeze.
Another scene, He’s taking a photo of the girl that he talked to earlier with his film camera.
Scene switched, A black and white closeup shot of the blonde lady in a very dreamy and blurry overlaps.
Another scene, He is lying down in his room casting the sunlight.
Scene switched, He and the teenage girl is drinking milk in under the tree.
Scene switched, He is gently hugging the girl in front of his house. then he hugs a woman in her 50s.
Another scene, he is bursting tears in from of his house.
Scene switched, he’s talking with the man in his 40s alongside a river. then he rides a bicycle, smiling.
Another scene, the blonde lady kisses him on his cheek and he looks very confused.
Scene switched, He’s holding a paper with simple game.
Scene switched, He’s laughing while driving a truck.
Scene switched, landscape of tokyo’s sunset
title “Perfect Days”
Ending scene. He close the door of his truck and came back home with a plant pot, dropping a key .
Reflection questions:
Takeaway
I personally was really enlightened by the last point – to add close captions.
Close captioning the whole video was really an effective way to give more information to viewers with different abilities.
It made me think not only about enhancing the “Blindness gain” by “Deaf Gain”, but also the captions help broader user to understand what is happening on the screen and help them to understand different languages spoken in the film.
Also it was interesting to see the cultural differences with captions for language translations – my home country always prefers to have visual captions for foreign films than having entirely dubbed audios. So for me having captions on the video is very natural – almost expected. Then I found out different countries prefer to have dubbing than captions. Some countries put the captions on the sides (left or right). For the viewer in that countries captions might feel a bit different than how I feel about it.
For the audio – I didn’t include the lyrics of the entire soundtrack as I though it was not too relevant to the original video and its context itself – especially thinking that it’s a trailer and in the movie there a lot of other music playing – also the cultural context as well – but might need to try to include the lyrics as well!
For transferring visual elements to audio descriptions – I excluded some of the texts that I though it’s not necessary to understand the whole video – such as some testimonials – but would like to include all of those and make a longer version of the video after getting feedback.
Additional Modality:
Netfilx’s takes on audio description of trailers.
I found some trailers that has audio descriptions. They don’t really pause the video to provide more information and pretty short . I hope to see more versions of audio captioning so that we have wider arrange of selection. These are some examples.