Seun Elemo: Midterm Portfolio – #4 Audio Description

Project Description:

I’m not quite sure of what made be think about using this infamous Bill Clinton speech, but I figured I wanted to go with something that was so notorious in American culture. That being a married sitting president who lied about having an affair with a white house intern. I wanted to play around with the idea of what would have happened if the viewers could read the minds of the participants.

Documentation:

My process included humor and timing when it came to the voices (which I personally did). I edited this project in CapCut. I found a bit of challenge in 1. repeatedly hearing my own voice, 2. making sure that my recordings didn’t clash with the audio of the original video. In the end, I thought it came out well.

 

Original Video:

Transcript:

N: Here comes the first lady of the United States of America, back in 1998 of course. Here to give a speech in defense of her lying husband…he’s the guy in the suit with the red tie in the back.

N: For some reason, everyone is excessively clapping. Kind of strange..hmmm.

N: This is Al Gore, the Vice President at the time, he secretly hopes that the President is guilty. He wants his job of course.

N: Here is the President at the time, Bill Clinton. He was smiling, but he was super guilty. Look at him.

N: He actually doesn’t do anything, he has speech writers for that.

N: He lies in 3…2…1

N: He in fact did have sexual relationships with that women, Ms. Lewinsky

N: Those allegations were very true actually.

Reflection questions: 

What is the theme of the work? What is it you aim to express?

The theme of my work is I wanted to express the ways in the public is lied to easily by our elected public officials. If we could see in the future, how would we truly view the words in which they told us? Who is behind the curtain?

How is that theme particularly expressed through the modality of the week?

The theme is expressed in a comprehensive way. The dialogue and the background audio allows the viewer to get a great sense of what was going on, even if they weren’t American. These types of events where public officials lie to the citizen is a perpetual occurrence worldwide.

Which elements of the work are beautifully/wonderfully/perfectly expressed through the modality?

I think the revealing of the hypocrisy of such a historic moment was expressed really nicely because the pacing allowed the user to follow. Meaning the user was able to hear the original audio, and then my voice without being confused and without feelings like both audio files were clashing. Allowing the user to switch between current view and hindsight view.

Which elements are lost or inexpressible through the modality of the week?

I felt like the background context of the video and its significance were a bit lost due to the modality, since it was a short video. and was stacked with two audio files, the choice to give a short description of the backstory got scrapped.

Who does this project exclude? Who would not be able to interact with this work? Who is this modality not accessible for?

This modality may exclude those who have low hearing as the audio isn’t super crisp and are a bit robotic since I used a filter on them, so some words maybe didn’t come across well.

Now that you’ve identified who is excluded, what is one way you could remix this piece to include another population? (You don’t have to make this part, but think about it and write about it)

If possible, I would get someone else to do the audio. Preferably someone with a powerful voice.

 

Additional Modality: 

For better accessibility I added a short text to add context into the speech for those were weren’t aware of this major event at the start of the video. It was short and easy to read. Additionally, I tweaked the song of the video as there was a lot of static and background noise I didn’t catch on the first time, which could have made it harder to hear certain dialogue. I tried my best to cut through it so the words said in the video are crisper.