The Challenges of Audio Describing Silent Films

THE SCRIPTER
If there has been no dialogue for a few minutes you can start to panic that the programme you are working on is going to be very heavy in terms of how many individual descriptions you will have to write. Working on a silent film then, you’d imagine, would be an utter nightmare but actually, for me anyway, it turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable experience.

One of the things that normally makes our work so challenging is having to fit our audio description in around the film or programme’s dialogue. We need to work out how to include key things in the short silences between the characters’ lines and sometimes that means continually editing down to make it fit the available space. There are times when we have to miss information out altogether but other times when there just isn’t anything happening that you can easily describe.

For a silent film, this process is pretty much turned on its head, although you are still restricted by time and have to choose which things are the most important on screen at any time.

When The Artist was broadcast on BBC Two last month, it was a big project for us with over 560 descriptions written – not the most we have ever written for a programme, but I imagine definitely up there as one of the most wordy, along with other foreign language films we have worked on. We wrote over 700 descriptions for Dances With Wolves, but that was a film over three hours long, whereas The Artist was only 90 minutes!

On this occasion, we split this scripting job between four of us as a film of a similar length, but with dialogue, would normally take a couple of days on average to script for one person. Apart from dream sections, where there were sound effects which we allowed to breathe, we had the freedom to actually write without dialogue interrupting our own rhythm, a rarity for us. It doesn’t hurt that it’s such a great film either and I for one, am really proud to have had the opportunity to work on the audio description.

THE VOICER
Once scripting is finished, the audio description soundtrack has to be recorded. Voicing the audio description for The Artist was obviously a mammoth task.

Usually, when a programme requires a large number of descriptions, it’s something like a foreign film – and that mostly involves reading out the subtitled dialogue. So working on a silent film like The Artist was a bit different.

Normally, the audio description will weave its way in between dialogue, signposting the salient point of the movie. In this case, it was more of a ninety-minute narration, which relied totally on the audio description to tell the story and convey the characters’ highs and lows. At the risk of sounding incredibly pretentious, I did much of it in one sitting so as to remain ‘in the moment’. Quite often if you take a break and return to voicing something, you might then be addressing the microphone in a slightly different way or at not exactly the same angle and this can sometimes affect the continuity. However. it was such a great script from all concerned and the story was so compelling, the time passed surprisingly quickly, mainly because I was following the story of the film, albeit divided up into nearly six hundred descriptions!

By Niki Stevens, Scripter
and Jim Clare, Audio Describer.