As the WGA and Hollywood strike rages on, I have been reflecting on the disabled and chronically ill workers in the film industry whose needs go unnoticed or silenced. The film industry is fueled by a fast-paced, cutthroat, and capitalistic work structure that reduces people to units of productivity. Within this work structure is the implicit message that you are as worthy as the amount of labor you provide and how efficient you are on a production set.
As a filmmaker who lives with active flare-ups, neurodivergence, and chronic pain, I am interested in bringing care work to the forefront of film production and filmmaking. I define care work that is rooted in disability justice as acts of love that prioritize the well-being of everyone on a set—from Production Assistant and DP to Talent and Director. Care work on a set can look like many different acts of kindness, but at the forefront is the desire to support folks in a way where they are not in pain, confused, or distressed in any way.
Some concrete examples are: making sure everyone on set has food their bodies can digest; having an hour-long lunch break where people can rest before getting back to filming; staying flexible and agile; having COVID-19 precautions on set; staying in communication with each other about capacity and needs. Care work communicates to others, “Your body-mind can feel safe here. We will look after you in the best ways we can.” Care work is not an afterthought, but rather an intention that starts as soon as pre-production begins. Care work is being thoughtful about things that you otherwise take for granted.
Recently, I took an Audio Description for Film training hosted by BlackStar Projects where I got the opportunity to learn how to write audio description scripts. The training taught me the basic principles of audio description and the importance of writing clear, concise, and vivid language when describing a scene.
Audio Description (AD for short) provides essential information to “individuals who are blind or who have low vision about visual content essential for comprehension. Audio description of video provides information about actions, characters, scene changes, on-screen text, and other visual content. Audio description supplements the regular audio track of a program.” (Source: The Audio Description Project)
AD has been used in pre-recorded media, art and museum exhibitions, live events, web content, architecture, and more. Basically, anything visual can be audio-described.
How would you describe a scene in a movie to someone who could not see it? What details would you include? What would you leave for their interpretation?
Before this training, I assumed Audio Description was similar to Closed Captions. I had never really thought about what a film experience would be for low-vision or blind folks. Although I am a person with low vision, I have never used Audio Description before, so this experience opened my mind to new ways of viewing film.
Audio description was originally conceived in 1964 conceived by a government worker and advocate, Chet Avery. But there were different points in history where AD popped up in different geographical locations. Because of this, there are no universally agreed upon standards or governing of the quality of AD in film. AD has also been historically white and economically privileged. A lot of the folks who first got into it had the ability to volunteer their time.
Benefits of Audio Description
(Source: The Ultimate Guide to Audio Description)
Accessibility: an accommodation for the 23.7 million Americans who have some degree of visual impairment
Autism: individuals on the autistic spectrum find that audio description helps better understand emotional and social cues only demonstrated through actions or facial expressions
Flexibility: for viewers to enjoy videos in an eyes-free environment
Language development: listening is a key step in learning language and associating it with appropriate actions and behaviors
Auditory learners: 20-30% of students say they retain information best through sound
Inattentional blindness: audio description can point out key visual elements to all viewers which otherwise may have been missed
Legal: required by law
During the training, we were visited by Thomas Reid from the Bronx (very important!!), a low-vision audio producer, audio describer, and narrator advocate, who shared his experience with audio description. He explained that AD is an art in and of itself, and relies on the describer and narrator to match the energy and feeling evoked within a film. AD is about access and making sure the Blind or low-vision viewer has the same experience as everyone else. AD is more than providing a boring, point-blank description or checking off an “accessibility” checklist. It’s really infusing filmmaking with care through the visual interpretation and translation of a film for low-vision and blind viewers.
Reid also emphasized the role that the narrator has in translating a film as well. In one example, he showed an audio-described scene from Black Panther (2018). The narrator was white and had a British accent. Although the audio description was clean and effective, the narrator’s voice describing scenes featuring Black characters evoked a sense of a National Geographic documentary where Indigenous and African cultures and people are studied. Here’s an example:
So care work in filmmaking considers all of these things— from the well-being of people on production sets to considering disabled audiences. Care work in film is cultivating a deep sense of curiosity and desire to bridge gaps of accessibility. It requires developing, and trusting, what Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha refers to as “crip emotional intelligence.”
“Crip emotional intelligence refers to the emotional intelligence that disabled people have, because of their lived experiences as disabled, that they use in order to support themselves and others in their community.”
Audio Description and making production sets more accessible are essential to shifting the capitalistic paradigm in filmmaking and film production. Care work is love in action.
To learn more about AD, Accessibility, Care Work:
Watch Discussion: Expanding Expression: Audio Descriptions and Captioning in Film
Learn more about how to make your films more accessible: FWD-Doc Recommended Practices, Guides, and Resources
Watch Vision Portraits, a feature-length doc that chronicles the creative paths of blind and low-vision artists.
Practice care work in every area of your life