Audio Description (part 4) - Ros Walker

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John Simpson 0:30

Hello and welcome to another edition of New Horizons Summer Series. I'm John Simpson. Thanks for joining us in this week's program. We're focusing on audio description as it relates to film, and in particular to films that made up a short film festival. My guest is Rosalyn Walker - a Tasmanian-based producer and the driving force behind the Grit Film Festival, in which all 10 films were audio described. Ros, welcome to New Horizons. 

Ros Walker

Thanks very much. John, nice to be here. 

John Simpson

Ros, we might start by talking a little bit about your background and the work that you've done in the in the film industry, in Tasmania.

Ros Walker 1:12

Well... I'm only a recent Tasmanian, only six and a half years which makes me a total newbie, I realised - and as I joke to people, I know I'm not going to live long enough to actually ever qualify as a Tasmanian. So I started my career in Melbourne, and I actually started in comedy. I managed comedy reviews and took a uni... Melbourne Uni revue around Australia when I was 24... and I managed comedy bands and music bands, and I did a film when I was going out with a writer who I'd met through the comedy reviews, and he and his friend were making a film, and I got involved with it, and I was naturally sort of an organizer and a bit bossy, probably, I was totally transfixed by not always loved films, and that was the start of it. 

So in my early 20s, I worked on a short film, and then started working on more short films and then moved into longer form.

John Simpson 2:07

So tell us about the Grit Film Festival. Where did that originate from?

Ros Walker 2:13

The Grit Film Festival was an idea from Abby Binning, who was then the head of Wide Angle Tasmania, and she applied to the Tasmanian Community Fund to make films that talked about the grit and resilience of Tasmanians, looking at stories in any form, really. So we had mainly documentaries, but we also had an animation, documentary and a drama and a comedy, and the films were designed to be made by Tasmanian filmmakers about Tasmanian issues and to promote discussions. And ideally, when you have discussions, then some of the issues can progress and be dealt with. 

And the Tasmanian Community Fund came on. The Wide Angle community worked around to make the films work. And I came on after a couple of other producers also had worked on the films as impact producers, Catherine Petman and Lara van Ray, and then I was the third person to come on, because everybody got different commitments along the way, and my job was to take them around Tasmania and to screen them to people, and also to take the films to specialist communities. For example, we did a series of eight screenings to seniors for the seniors festival in 2023 which was great fun. 

And now the films are going out to neighborhood houses, Tasmania, through libraries, Tasmania, and also through a fairer world, and also they're going to be available for teachers to use in the classroom. So they've got quite a long life. These short films, a long life. And I imagine a long gestation period when did always start. The first lot of films were made in 2022 and then the second lot of films were finished in by April 2023, so they were made in two lots. And yeah, the first film started touring around, and then the major tour was with all of the films.

John Simpson 4:16

And tell us about the intersection with audio description. How'd that come about?

Ros Walker 4:21

We wanted to make the films accessible to everyone. And being fair, we hadn't thought about it in the first iteration of the touring. And then some people in one of the seniors festivals said, Why aren't the films captioned? And I said, well, the tricky thing is that we're screening them in all sorts of venues with all sorts of equipment, like some places, some cinemas. It was a DCP, like a digital cinema package, and others, it was via DVDs. We had to make DVDs. Others, was straight from USBs. 

And because of all of the different technical challenges, we hadn't really thought about well, we had thought about it, but hadn't really dealt with how we could make the films more accessible, but we realised that that was an error on our part, and that really it wasn't fair to people who had low hearing or low vision to not be able to enjoy the films. So what we've done is we're giving people three versions so they can screen it with no captioning or audio description, then there's a version with captioning, and then there's a version with captioning, with audio description. And yeah, it's good. Everyone's very excited that they can screen the films to everybody now.

John Simpson 5:43

And your own involvement... had you had any involvement with audio description before this?

Ros Walker 5:50

Ah, yes, I had. So I've done, I've mainly been working in feature documentaries for the last decade. And we, I did a film about the submarine murderer in Copenhagen called Into the Deep, which is on Netflix. So that was transcribed into very many languages, with audio description for all territories and also captioning for every territory. So I wasn't personally responsible for that. That was a Netflix job, because I think they were 76 versions or something. 

And then a documentary I did called everybody's Omar. We did audio description for that, and I wasn't too involved, except for paying for it and organising it, but we had a very good audio description done by a sighted person who works with people with low vision. So she had a certain amount of experience there. So she wrote the dialog, and then she did the audio description for that. It was a lot less hands on than this process for grit, and truthfully, I really enjoyed the process for grit, and I would prefer to use that model for audio description going forward. 

Because, apart from it being delightful to work with Vaughn Bennison, it gave a really interesting result. Because as a filmmaker, and I'd watch these films dozens of times each, so I can recite them to youwhen you know a film really well, it's really interesting to have another layer added to it and basically get a different perspective on it, which is what happened during the process. It was totally fascinating, and was like creating poetry, almost.

John Simpson 7:37

So let's talk about that and how you and yes, Vaughn Bennison, that voice that's well known to New Horizons listeners. And of course, now the president of Blind Citizens Australia, you and he worked collaboratively.

Ros Walker 7:52

So what we did was, we would screen the film, and I would describe to Vaughn what was happening. And then he would quiz me on it. So I might describe there is a woman and a small girl walking along the beach. And what I would do is I would say, Sarah and her daughter walking along the beach, and Vaughn would go, Hang on - how do we know that her name is Sarah? And how do we know that Sarah has a daughter? It is... do we know this already? Have you... have we had a subtitles that gave them the name? And I would go, No, we haven't. I was just calling them their names because I know that that's their names. 

So Vaughn was very insistent that for people with low vision, it's just as important for them that they don't get told information before a sighted audience would get the same information, because that's part of the storytelling. You may not introduce someone's name till later. You may not know that this woman and the child are the key people that you're going to see in the short film. They might be peripheral characters that are going to lead you to the main character, so you have to have that right balance and introduce the language so that the low vision person has the same experience of moving through the story that a sighted person would have. 

And that was fascinating, because I of course, was dreadful at describing things. I got a bit better, I think. But at the start it was terrible, like I was, like a bad author. I was going, there is a forest and there are lots of trees. What sort of trees? Vaughn would say, Are they pine trees? Are they a particular type of tree that we would know, are they green? Are they sparse? Are they full, like he, as I said, was like a writer or a poet with so many words and ways of describing things that he would have to prod me to make me give him an accurate description. So it was... it was quite hard, actually, but really, really interesting to have to actually describe physically what was on the scene. 

Because I think when you're sighted, you're lazy, you just see what's on there, and you just accept it all into your brain. And that's fine, but when you have to actually describe what's there, it's work to describe what's there. And Vaughn was very good at saying, Is it misty in the forest or is it a clear sky behind it? Does it feel like it's day or night? Is there anything specific about the atmosphere that you can tell me? So he would look for things that would give atmosphere. Give a sense of time of day, give a sense of the mood that we've got.

And then where... he was, like a beautiful poet, he would have to fit the description in between the dialog, and so you might only have 10 seconds to describe this forest. So with everything that I'd given him, he would then say He is walking through a sparse forest. It's misty and dark and foreboding-looking. And he would make that fit into 10 seconds, and he would perfectly describe what you were seeing on scene, like he could capture the essence of it. So all filmmaking is tight in terms of screen time, and I guess none more so than short films.

John Simpson 11:30

How did you determine what you were going to leave out?

Ros Walker 11:34

We had discussions about it. And the Grit films were quite challenging, because the majority of them are documentaries, and quite often, what people do in documentaries is they might interview somebody, and then they keep the voice going while you're seeing what we call B roll, where that person is, you know, wandering across a field or whatever. And that meant that when you look at it, there wasn't much space. And it made me as a filmmaker, a little bit more educated that sometimes we crowd the soundtrack and sometimes it would be good to leave a bit more room. 

That was a really interesting creative lesson for me was how crowded the soundtracks were. And I think they would have could, some of them could have been stronger with a bit more of a gap, but yes, some of them, we couldn't put much audio description in at all, because there was just back to back dialog. And others we were able to put in, you know, really, really describe everything that was happening on screen. But if we couldn't, what Vaughan would look for would be his, because he said quite rightly, a lot of the dialog will or what the interviewee is saying, will tell you what the film is about, and will tell you the story. 

So for him, it was most important to work out what were the key elements for the person hearing the story. So he would say things like, okay, it's more important that we know they're near the sea, rather than he's on a motorbike, that sort of thing. So we had to make decisions about which information we gave people. One of the things that was really interesting was learning how much information somebody gets from the soundtrack and from the sound effects and so forth. So sometimes I would feel we'd have to describe something in detail, and Vaughn would go, No, no, we can hear the wind. We know it's windy, so we don't have to say that.

John Simpson 13:39

Ros, this is a fascinating discussion - and because of my own interest in audio description, we could continue forever, but radio programs and podcasts are, of course, limited, so I just want to take the opportunity to thank you very much for this insight into the process of audio describing these films for the Grit Film Festival, and thank you for your time today. My guest has been Ros Walker, who is a Tasmanian film producer in the driving force, or one of the driving forces behind the Grit Film Festival. 

And of course, don't forget that if you want to contact Blind Citizens Australia, you can phone them on one 800 zero, double three, double six, zero... or email them on bca@bca.org.au ... Thanks for joining me for this week's program. This is John Simpson, until we speak again.

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