Audio Description (part 5) - Christine Malec

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Graeme Innes 0:30

Hello. Welcome to this episode of New Horizons, our summer series on Audio Description. I'm Graeme Innes, thanks for listening. This week, we're talking to someone who has a podcast about audio description coming out of Toronto in Canada. It's called Talk Description to Me - one of the hosts of the podcast is Christine Malec, and we're talking with Christine today. So welcome to New Horizons, Christine. 

Christine Malec

Thank you so much. I'm very happy to be here. 

Graeme Innes

Could you start please, Christine, by telling us about yourself and your interest in audio description?

Christine Malec 1:09

Yeah, I'm totally blind, so my interest in audio description initially was completely as a user, as a consumer of audio description and work, sort of my work streams came together so that I got to meet a few audio describers, and I formed areal connection with JJ hunt and also with a few other audio describers. And so my career at this moment involves audio description in a few ways, one of which is the talk description to me podcast. But also I do some consulting with audio describers who have you know, written their their scripts for this or that thing, and are looking for consultation from a blind or low vision user, and also as an audio description narrator. 

So as as you may or may not know, when the person who writes an audio description script is not necessarily the person whose voice you hear, and there's a... growing movement to bring more blind people into the practice of audio description in varying ways, and narration is one of the most obvious sort of low hanging fruit ways. So I've been doing some narration of audio description as well, which is quite fun. It feels like I'm really, really on the inside now and get to be creating content as well as consuming it.

Graeme Innes 2:37

So what prompted you and JJ to start this podcast?

Christine Malec 2:43

It was one of those products of COVID Because first of all, when, when lockdowns started in early 2020, everyone was sort of at home and freaked out and not really knowing what was coming next. And so there was this combination of, we can't do the usual work that we do. But also there was this whole visual landscape that people were seeing in the news that blind people were not getting access to. So JJ and I started talking about this, and he really wanted to be entering the podcast field, and he was just, we were pals, and so he was describing things like empty streets and boarded up windows and everyone wearing masks, and the just the visuals of COVID, which were so new and frankly, sort of alarming and frightening. 

And it got us to talking about the gap that exists in current events, because when there's news coverage, you have a news reader, and they're talking all the time, and so there's no time to describe anything, but there's always images, and there's lots of memes on social media, and that's how a lot of the popular conversation gets moved forward. And in talking about that, we we decided, well, there's this big gap, and we've got time. And so we started, we started producing episodes of talk description to me, so it's, it started as current events, but it's become a broader field on which we talk about a lot of the visuals of the world around us. 

We brainstorm about topics. So sometimes it will be me, sometimes it will be JJ say, hey, this would make a really good episode. Or, you know, this, this thing that's happening is really important. We we should cover this. And so it could be either of us who comes up with the idea. And then he might say, okay, which which aspects of this are you as a blind person, missing out on what's of particular interest to you. So he will take my answers and write up a bunch of notes based on that. He's really good at researching, too. 

So he will research the context of things that he's describing, and then I... we sort of roughly map out what we're going to talk about, but we're just, we're really good chatting people, so we will start within a an episode where I'll sort of set it up and ask a question, and then it's just a conversation in which he does most of the talking. But it's, it's guided by my curiosity about what the thing is. But sometimes he'll use a comparison, like he'll say, you know, it's like a tornado. And then I take a step back and say, Actually, I don't really know what that means. Can you... what does a tornado look like? 

And so it gives us the chance to go beyond the conventional boundaries of audio description, and actually get a question and answer sort of process going, and that's sort of where the episode comes comes from, and then I do the editing, because, well, we both have the editing skills. But JJ feels strongly that it should be the judgment of a blind or low vision, person which decides what gets included and what's less important. 

One of the things that really stands out to me is the number of times that you have what we would call in Australia, an Aha moment, and the number of of times that I've had those on the podcast arriving at an understanding of something that, as a as a blind person, all my life, I have just never understood before.

Graeme Innes 6:27

Is that one of the things that makes the process important to you?

Christine Malec 6:31

Oh yes, yes. I've have so many of those moments. My gosh. We did an episode on GPS apps and how when you're in a car and you're driving and you're looking at your GPS screen, the screen rotates its orientation when you turn the car. And when he said it, I went, Ah, yes, that makes sense, because I was just picturing a static map on which you watch yourself running around in the car. But really it makes sense that it would be from your point of view. 

So sometimes the Aha moments are, Oh, now I see how those pieces fit together. But then occasionally there's Aha moments where I just go, Whoa! So another example is in Canada, at least on... you get a bunch of bananas, there's little stickers on the bananas. I always assumed it just said [?dole] banana or something, but those stickers can have ads on them. They could have ads for a Disney movie or something, and I felt gross. So the Aha moments are very wide ranging, and so yes, that process is intensely satisfying. And again, it's something that I don't think you're like as likely to have in a static audio description on a movie or TV. 

Yeah, and there's been some other faci... I mean, they're all fascinating in their ways, but some of myfavourites, or other ones, are the flags of the world that you did, the Mars landing, the moon and its... phases.

Graeme Innes 8:02

And really, you both enjoy this work. I mean, there's a clear bond between you. You know how you both laugh so readily during the podcast, this must assist with the... making of the episodes.

Christine Malec 8:17

Oh, hugely, we're such pals... like we were friends, like we spend time together recreationally. Are the four of us, like my partner and JJ's partner. We go over dinner. We have a amazing, you know, rapport and friendship, and he's just an awesome human, like and I... safe to say he would say the same of me. We share a perspective on the world, and we share a really concrete set of values that that align beautifully, and so we make each other laugh. We both have active imagine, maybe overly active imaginations, and we have a lovely rapport, and we have trust in each other in full.

Like I'll give an example of... this is one of the most recent episodes. Taylor Swift was performing in Toronto. She had six shows, very unprecedented. I'm not a Taylor Swift Fan. I don't love her music. I have huge respect for her music, but I didn't really know it. The US election was happening, and there was a lot of terrible things going on in the world, and everything was so frightening. And I said to JJ, Please, can we go downtown and just hang out outside the Taylor Swift show and just suck up the vibe and talk about the visuals? And I think at first he was like... Oh, okay, but we went and it was absolutely everything I wanted it to be. It was beautiful. It was so much gorgeous female energy, and we found ways to get people to deuce their own self descriptions of their outfits. 

And so we each come up with these ideas. And we might not always completely love, you know, right like we don't always right away go, yes, that's a we trust. We trust each other because we know each other so well, and we... just always have a laugh. We always have a good time. And so we can pitch these ideas to each other that might sound sort of peculiar, but we just go with it, and they usually pan out into something really fun. And yes, I would say that our our rapport and our the way that the ways that our values align really comes through. And frankly, I think it makes the podcast as good as it is.

Graeme Innes 10:24

Where do you see the podcast going in the future?

Christine Malec 10:28

We have a lot of ideas. We are such ideas people. And so the kinds of things I want to do, I'd love to just get back into the rhythm of... you know, an episode a week, if we could afford to do that, because there's always things in current events to cover, always, always, always. But aside from that, some of the things I'd love to do are, I'd like to talk about the natural world from a few perspectives. And so one, one idea I'd love to pursue in a like, say, a limited podcast series, is the visuals of the natural world, but also including the visuals of climate change and the visuals of mitigating things that people are doing, like... so we did... a bit of this, like wind farms and solar farms.

Graeme Innes 11:13

What do those look like?

Christine Malec 11:14

So that's one area I'd love to focus in on more. I'm a big music lover. So one, one thing that I'd love to do is in any city, but especially Toronto, because it's our home city, is go to the storied music venues, the music venues everyone knows, and talk about the visuals. Just walk through and do a visual the art on the wall like, Oh, there's a picture of Neil Young and there's Jim Cuddy's guitar or whatever. So those are sort of very specific projects that I would like to do, but I would love to be able to just, I kind of liked the the rigour of producing an episode each week. 

So each week, you know, there was... a need to come up with a topic, and it was never difficult. It was more of an aspect, a process of narrowing it down. But the other... thing is that when you're doing that, there's a, I don't... obligation's the wrong word, but I'll use it anyway to talk about the hard stuff too. And that was one of the harder parts... is like, I don't know if you've gotten to this one yet, but we did an episode about school shootings in the United States, and it's gut wrenching. It was hard. We both hated it, like it was important, it was important, but we really it was sickening. 

And so there's that part of it too, like part of me wants to be doing that work. Part of me wants to get paid a lot of money to do that, because it's very hard emotionally too. I also think that those images are really important. So I would also like to go back to having the resources to do that. And I'll just be honest, like, those are so hard that I want to be paid to do those. Some of the most recent episodes we've been doing are really fun, and we've been doing them without funding because we just want to, and we just like doing it. But those hard ones, you know, that's news, that's that's journalism. And so I would like to be doing those again, too. 

And when we sort out the fun... the funding situation, which is, you know, I'm working hard. I'm really working it. So I think that that will happen.

Graeme Innes 13:16

Where can people find the [?part]? Christine, if people would like to listen. Where can people find it?

Christine Malec 13:22

Yeah, it's on all the major podcast platforms. So wherever you get your podcasts, you can type in talk description to me. There's also the website, it's just talk description to me dot com, and I think we're at episode 128 or so. So there's... lots, and honestly, it's like, there's, I could listen again and just learn it all over again, because I can't remember all of those things that we talked about. Like, yeah.

Graeme Innes 13:48

If you would like to get in touch with Blind Citizens Australia, you can visit bca.org.au ... or call the office on 1800 033 660,or you can email bca@bca.org.au ... also Blind Citizens Australia relies heavily, as does Christine's podcast, on donations from its members and the public. And if you'd like to become a BCA backer like me, then there's a staff member who you can call and talk to them about that. I'm Graeme Innes, New Horizons will be back again next week with the final of our summer series on audio description.

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