Joanne Kwon: Midterm Portfolio – #4 Audio Description

Project Description:

This project involves incorporating audio descriptions to an already existing short video, while thinking about objectivity and subjectivity. I worked on adding audio descriptions to a heartwarming video of two dog buddies on FaceTime (original video clip link).

Because this scene is fairly unusual, I knew I needed to pause the video to ensure I can fully describe the scene to provide some context in the audio description. During that pause I tried to remain neutral when describing the scene, avoiding being too subjective and making assumptions about the scene. The goal: to convey exactly what is seen.

This video isn’t very serious and more of a light watch, so I began thinking of how I could also have the audio description encompass this type of voice and language. I wanted it to be less structured and almost like a friend is telling you about the video on the fly, so I decided to use a slightly animated, excited voice for the audio description.

Documentation:

Transcript:

There’s a video on top of a white background.

The text above the video reads, they haven’t seen each other for a while and today they FaceTimed.

Next to the text there’s an emoji with tears welling up at the bottom of its two large eyes and an upturned mouth.

The video shows a close up on the right side of a dark short-haired dog’s face.

The short-haired dog whimpers while looking at something in front of them.

The camera turns to the right, showing an iPad with a multi-colored long-haired dog on the other side of the screen.

The long-haired dog cuts off the short-haired dog’s whimper, raising it’s head and letting out a long howl toward the sky.

The scene closes in on the upper right corner of the iPad where the short-haired dog abruptly tilts its head to the left as the long-haired dog continues to howl.

The scene zooms back out to show the long-haired dog still howling.

The camera shakes back and fourth as the person holding the camera laughs in the background.

The long-haired dog lowers it’s head and begins whimpering.

Video ends.

Reflection Questions:

All in all, I felt that this video and the audio description cohesively work together to relay the light-hearted nature of the video. The most difficult part of creating an audio description for this video was figuring out when I need to pause or slow down the video to describe the scene, especially because there aren’t many cuts in the scene that would make the pause more appropriate. Additionally, there’s a lot of abrupt movements in the video making it difficult to determine whether I should or shouldn’t describe those movements.

Something that was lost in the audio description was the tone and the frequency of the howls of the dogs. In another iteration I would want to focus on this aspect of the howls because it’s what makes the video all the more entertaining for the audience. How can I fully represent the howls and the emotions behind the dog’s cries in both the audio description and captions.

This video lacks the written descriptions necessary to fully reflect the auditory details in the video (i.e. like what I shared about the dog’s howls above). In order to remix and improve the piece I would try to utilize some of the pauses I include in the for the audio description to include some more descriptive terms to fully convey these details through the captions. That would make the experience of this video all the more enjoyable for all.

Some thing this project made me ponder about was how we could incorporate audio descriptions for short video clips on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube?