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So, earlier this year I wrote an independent audio-description script for the special edition of ALIENS, which was subsequently recorded and mixed also by an independant low vision voice-over artist.

I wrote a little about it on the forum here (https://www.avpgalaxy.net/forum/index.php?topic=66647.0), and in greater detail on my personal web-site (https://brett.coulstock.id.au/aliens-1986-audio-description.html).

While recording ALIENS, the VO artist — Kyle — suggested tackling Alien³.

Now, I don't love Alien³. I saw it in theatres (I still have the cinema stub) and I won't lie: I was disappointed. The saga of the troubled production is well documented, as is the director's personal dislike of the end product.

I felt, despite its good points, it just wasn't the calibre of the first two films.

That said, we change over time, and while I think it's true that I will never love the film, I find I can definitely respect it. Killing Newt and Hicks, in face of the happy ending of ALIENS is perhaps cruel, but bold, wrenching the series back to the fundamental underlying nihilism of the first film. The ending, too, is extraordinary: horror being one of the few genres where you can get away dooming or doing-away with the main character without the audience outright balking at it. When the main character knows their fate, it changes the dynamic from basic survival to larger, greater issues, or shows different and fascinating facets of the character.

And there's much to admire: the music is sublime, perhaps the best score of all of them. The cast is stuffed with ridiculously excellent English actors. The setting of a prison / decommissioned ore refinery is compelling. Despite Fincher's dislike of the film, he's Fincher and he can't not do a good job.

And I've seen some empassioned defence of the film — especially the Assembly Cut — here on the forums, which makes me step back and try to see it better.

But this post is not about what's wrong with the film, or about what's great about the film, it's about my attitude to the material.

The respect I have for it means that I'm willing to devote the many, many hours that are going to be required to write an AD script, to go into this project wanting to do a great job, to bring to the surface what makes the story and characters compelling, and completes the journey of Ripley.

So, I'm going to use this thread to post occasional notes on my work and progress, and eventually the script and pointers to accessing the final product.

AMA, as I go, if any part of the process interests you.

The 20th Century Fox Logo

The first thing in the film is the 20th Century Fox logo.

(https://brett.coulstock.id.au/images/alien3/alien3-001-20th-century-fox.jpg)

This gets described. There are several reasons for this.

It seems incredible to me, but I've heard blind and low-vision people wish that adverts were described. When you  don't have the visual information, and you don't understand what's going on, this leads to feelings of being excluded. We describe everything, because it's inclusive.

Another reason to describe logos is that it's a commercial product, and the companies want everyone to know this is their film. That's why they come before the film, not afterwards.

(As an aside, this can form powerful associations: as a child I would hear the 20th Century Fox fanfare from across the house and tear into the living room because the 20th Century Fox fanfare = "Star Wars" in my mind).

A third reason to describe the logos is that it signals to the blind and low vision audience that they have correctly selected the audio-description track, and everything is working correctly. It means they don't need to fiddle around with the menus, or check their headsets in the theatre, or whatever. They can settle in and enjoy the film.

As I already described the logo for ALIENS it's just an easy copy and paste job!

QuoteSearchlights sweep the evening-sky behind a giant edifice of carved, golden letters.
20th Century Fox.

As a note, some companies standardise their audio-description, as it is yet another dimension of their branding.

I could have re-used one of these standardised versions for 20th Century Fox, but I chose not to do this for the sole reason that this is independant audio-description script and not comissioned by any company, and I am going to release the script under a Creative Commons licence, and so I need to be able to assert copyright over all of it.

Titles / Opening Credits

The titles of Alien³ begin with an establishing shot of deep space.

(https://brett.coulstock.id.au/images/alien3/alien3-002-deep-space.jpg)

I was able to re-use one of the cues for ALIENS:

QuoteDeep space. Stars glitter, distant and cold.

I didn't have to, but I liked the idea of subtly linking the two AD scripts, giving a sense that the two films are connected. If I ever do a script for ALIEN (there exist 3 versions already, so unlikely) I would use the same phrase again.

Alan Dean Foster did a similar thing with his three novelisations, opening each book with a discussion of dreamers and dreams.

As George Lucas says, it's like poetry, they rhyme (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFqFLo_bYq0).

---

The titles of Alien³ consist of text credits over a scene of deep space, interspersed with scene fragments.

The credits need to be read out, and the visuals described. In ALIENS, this was relatively easy, as the credits mostly were over black, or over a star-field with the Narcissus drifting passively.

Here, this is much harder. There are two main issues to consider.

The first is that a half-second of screen time can give an enormous amount of information visually. Translating even the bones of what's on screen to audio description is inevitably going to run longer than the actual visual, so the describer must be both economical and evocative and choose the most essential information to convey.

For example, the scene of the egg lasts 3 seconds, and then it's juxtaposed back to the star-field with "Paul McGann" on it.

(https://brett.coulstock.id.au/images/alien3/alien3-003-titles-01.jpg)

And the cues I wrote are:

QuoteCharles S. Dutton.

On board, glued beneath a machine housing, an alien egg, slime dripping from its open petals.

Paul McGann.

(As an aside, don't you love that the ship's name Sulaco is embossed on a totally unimportant strut? It's ridiculous sign-posting, in a place where it'll never be noticed. One thing I love about writing AD is that you notice these kind of details).

To fit the description of the egg, the voice-over starts before the Charles S. Dutton text has faded from screen. And I would have preferred the word "mucus" to "slime", but time is of the essesnce and "mucus" has two syllables.

Audio Description is, therefore, a lot of juggling, a lot of decision making, and a lot of compromises.

The second problem is the interspersing of credits and action, or overlaying credits over action. This is a particular challenge, because the danger is that the two run confusingly together. Louise Fryer in her book An Introduction to Audio Description: A Practical Guide (2016) notes the audio description for The Girl with the Pearl Earring featured some outlandish and strange sentences during the credits which were shown over a series of scenes. The result of not separating the text of the credits and the description leads to sentences like this:

QuoteGriet packs a bundle in her room, takes a moment to look back, and goes to her mother, Scarlett Johansson.

The mother was not played by Scarlett Johanson, but the awkward juxtaposition suggests it. So that's something we work hard to avoid.

Now what I'm writing here is a draft, so this is all to be revised. One thing I've noticed is that the star-field is not static — our view shifts downwards constantly, giving a sense of falling. I suspect this is to mirror both the EEV fall coming up, and Ripley's fall at the end of the film.

Part of my revision will be to see if I can somehow bring in that sense of falling to the audience.

If I can't, I will tell myself what I always tell myself about this process: "you can only do what you can do".

Maybe just leave out the Egg...

Quote from: BlueMarsalis79 on Nov 06, 2023, 04:10:22 PMMaybe just leave out the Egg...

How will the audience be able to participate in the old "where did it come from?" debate if I leave it out?  ;)

True, it would make Alien 3 even less interesting than it already is.

:laugh:

You also going to describe the quality of the rod puppet compositing?

Theatrical cut or the Assembly cut?

Just leave it out, you have more important things to note with that moment, like literally anything else.

Glad you finally got to the most interesting Alien production. 

8)

Quote from: BlueMarsalis79 on Nov 07, 2023, 09:38:10 AM:laugh:

You also going to describe the quality of the rod puppet compositing?

Theatrical cut or the Assembly cut?

Just leave it out, you have more important things to note with that moment, like literally anything else.

Glad you finally got to the most interesting Alien production. 

8)

:) I know this one is your favourite. Doing Assembly Cut, which I've never seen, and I feel will probably be better than theatrical.

But honestly, part of the job is to describe everything to the fullest extent possible, but still give a good audio experience (ie. don't over-describe and fill up every single moment without dialouge with narration). We can't make editorial omissions because that is unfair to the audience. The blind and low-vision audience should have the same access to the story where it's possible.

Interesting that you mention the rod-puppet compositing though. I've previously done some (indie, unofficial, unpaid) Doctor Who audio description, and of course that begs the question of how to describe bad special effects, which I discussed with some blind/low-vision people.

The conclusion we arrived at was to honour the film-makers intention, but equally not to oversell it and suggest it was awesome.

Which is what I'll be doing here, to take the special effects at face value, and do my best to deliver a good movie-going experience.

Quote from: NecronomIV on Nov 07, 2023, 10:01:11 AMDoing Assembly Cut, which I've never seen, and I feel will probably be better than theatrical.

Quote from: Local Trouble on Nov 07, 2023, 10:10:21 AM

Quote from: NecronomIV on Nov 07, 2023, 10:01:11 AMDoing Assembly Cut, which I've never seen, and I feel will probably be better than theatrical.

Thank you for your input, but your views regarding the merits of either version are not relevant.

My job is not actually to like or dislike the film but simply to deliver the highest quality description possible to the best of my ability. This is the version I'm personally most interested in, and the version my collaborator suggested.

Further discussion of this issue is off topic. Thank you.

Interested to see how you handle the scene of Ripley hallucinating in the basement.

Thank you! I'll make a point of discussing that when I get to it.

I want to hear an audio description of the rape goggles.

And whatever this is supposed to be:

(https://i.imgur.com/BIYUEKl.jpg)

Blood soaking into gauze.

But whose blood and why?  I don't understand why anyone would be bleeding at that point in the sequence, so I'm curious if the audio description will say if it's "Ripley's blood" or something.

After all, SM always said it could only be Hicks.

Quote from: Local Trouble on Nov 07, 2023, 11:14:53 AMI want to hear an audio description of the rape goggles.
And whatever this is supposed to be.
https://i.imgur.com/BIYUEKl.jpg

I've written the cue for that. It's:

QuoteRed blood soaks into gauze.

(We typically use present tense to give a sense of the immediacy of watching the film.

It's not necessary to know exactly what something is, or to interpret.

At the most fundamental level, the job is to describe the visual, and so doing give a blind or low-vison person as much information as a sighted person has. Then they can speculate what it is and what it means (like everyone else).

As for the goggles, we'll see when we get there.  :)

I'm about 30 minutes into describing the film now.

I have a day job, and audio description is highly asymmetric to run-time. It takes approximately 2 hours to describe 20 minutes of film. Alien³ is quite a lot of 20 minutes. Anyway, I thought I'd talk about naming characters, because it's a thing.

So, what do we call this guy?

(https://brett.coulstock.id.au/images/alien3/alien3-004-clemens.jpg)

Audio Description is an attempt to give a blind or low-vision person the same information as a sighted person, and part of that is to not give them more information than a sighted person.

So, in the description if I was to refer to the character as "Clemens", then that's problematic as even a sighted person wouldn't know that. At most, they'd say "Hey, it's that guy who was in, you know, that thing ... you remember ..."

There's a prevailing school of thought in audio description that you do not refer to a character by name, until they have been named in the production.

So, without a name, they are usually given a sort of visual placeholder nickname. Like "the brunette" or "the bearded man".

There are two side-effects to this.

The first is that the nickname, say "The woman with the eye-patch" usually takes up more syllables than the actual name, let's call her "Jane". It necessarily cuts into remaining space for other description. We strive for economy, for brevity, and this largely runs counter to that.

The second is that it can lead to situations where — as in at least one AD for ALIEN — the narrator is referring to Dallas, Lambert and "The dark haired man" exploring the derelict, because it takes that long for someone to call Kane by his name. Which is really just ridiculous. Some people cling rigidly to rules, instead of looking at the situation and adapting their approach.

In the theatrical cut of ALIENS, no-one mentions Ripley's name until the Board-Room Debriefing; until then in the audio description track on Crave, she's "The wavy haired woman."

My own approach in my version of ALIENS was to refer to Ripley by name without waiting, because it's a sequel, and there's no mystery to preserve for her character. The names of all the marines were referred to on a computer screen, so I felt confident naming them as they were introduced, rather than when their names were used incidentally.

In Alien³ I'm going to refer to Ripley, Newt, Hicks and Bishop without introduction.

But I'll follow the industry standard and use placeholders until the characters are named.

Of course, one problem with describing Alien³ is that it's largely populated wth characters who are functionally bald guys, mostly white bald guys, wearing pretty much the same kind of clothes. Not so much to distinguish them.

So, let's look at when we can start using people's names.

• Ripley (in writing) at 07:27.
• Andrews (in writing) at 08:35.
• Frank at 08:44 (but he's just one bald guy among many)
• Dillon at 09:38 (straight away, thank heavens!)
• Clemens at 13:00
• Ripley (in dialogue) at 14:49
• Murphy is introduced as "murph" at 24:51.
• Frank is named again at 25:19, it's much easier to identify him.
• Golic at 32:12 (two so-far nameless prisoners are complaining about him)
• Mr Aaron, 34:06.

(So if you ever write a movie script, you can do the audio describers a favour by naming every important character as soon as possible, even if it's just a flash of a security badge or an offhand comment. It would have been great if one of the prisoners who look dumbly at Clemens when he carried in Ripley said "Hey Clemens!"

So what am I going to call Clemens?

So far I've gone with "The blue-eyed man", because there are several shots where his piercing blue eyes are quite apparent; but I'm not happy with it, and I may change it later.

Other Details

One thing I love about audio description is that because of the stop-starting and continual replaying, you pick up some background details.

I have no idea if anyone has done a fine tooth-comb through Alien³ but I noticed these:

(https://brett.coulstock.id.au/images/alien3/alien3-005-rocket-medical.jpg)

(Above) Enhanced screenshot. It's always fun to see brand-names in the future. Looks like investing in Rocket Medical PLC (http://www.rocketmedical.com/) is a good long term investment.

(https://brett.coulstock.id.au/images/alien3/alien3-006-abattoir.jpg)

(Above) If you scrutinse the abattoir, you can get some insight into the diet of the prisoners. In this screen-shot, top-right, there is a rabbit hanging still with the fur on its head and paws, and what appears to be a meat bird further in the background bottom-right. There's definitely somewhere they're keeping animals for eating.

It's been a long time since I've seen the film (and only Theatrical at that) so I don't know if a sort of farmyard area is ever shown, but I guess they also keep the oxen somewhere.

I get that the overriding philosophy is to duplicate the sighted experience, but I feel like a more sane method is to simply follow the lead set by the screenplay.

If there's some purpose to hiding a character's name from the script reader, perhaps to create a sense of mystery, then the character will be given some suitably anonymous identifier (e.g. MAN IN HAT) until the time comes to reveal his real name (e.g. SMITH). But if there's no story purpose for that anonymity then the screenwriter will normally reveal the character's name ahead of time. It keeps things simple and easy to follow.

But you obviously know what you're doing. Naturally, I defer to your superior knowledge.

TC

I wonder what people who use the system actually prefer? It seems that there is no actual standard.

 I would've gone with what TC suggested - withhold the name only as necessary, otherwise get it done with so you can refer to the character by name.

In Terminator 2 the script refers to the T-1000 as Mr X, then Officer X, then finally T-1000 as the layers are revealed. But outside those situations I'd have thought naming the character was fine.

Quote from: Local Trouble on Nov 07, 2023, 11:29:24 AMBut whose blood and why?  I don't understand why anyone would be bleeding at that point in the sequence, so I'm curious if the audio description will say if it's "Ripley's blood" or something.

After all, SM always said it could only be Hicks.

I've said this before and I'm sure no one agrees with me, but I believe it is Hicks slowly being impaled through his bandaged chest by the support beam.

Which, of course, doesn't actually happen until the eev crash, and a lot more instantaneously than depicted here.

It's a continuity error.

Quote from: TC on Nov 24, 2023, 08:47:55 AMI get that the overriding philosophy is to duplicate the sighted experience, but I feel like a more sane method is to simply follow the lead set by the screenplay.

Quote from: SiL on Nov 24, 2023, 09:16:43 AMI wonder what people who use the system actually prefer? It seems that there is no actual standard.

Well, I just went ahead and threw out the question on a Discord largely populated by Audio Description consumers:

Quote"personally prefer it if a show has a bigger cast than usual or where it doesn't matter if the character is named in any way at all, mystery or otherwise for them to be named so that I can associate their voices and whatever description of theirs is given if at all in my head to begin with, "

Quote"Probably good not to give that information until the film does, I woudl think, but there might be exceptional times when it might be good to do the other thing"

Quote"I don't have strong feelings either way. Not naming them keeps closest to the intended experience, but keeping track of character names is probably easier than appearances for a lot of blind people. Also "Greg" is fewer syllables than "the brown-haired man", which matters when you need to squeeze descriptions between dialogue."

Quote"for people with sight, they'd usually know that X is playing Y, and if X is famous however slightly, they'd know the name anyway."

Quote"The sighted people might be more likely to recognise the actor by sight if it happens to be a somewhat famous person in their purview, but they wouldn't have any firmer idea of the name of the character beforehand than we would"

Quote"I enjoy the descriptive of the technique, however a lot of the time the  AD will have the same  3-5  word phrase to describe that unknown character and it gets used over and over in a short period of time. this can become annoying. I think the technique should be preserved  for minor characters of something, but I really don't see the point when it comes to the major cast of a show, unless it is really needed to preserve the context of the show."

QuoteI see no point in not revealing a main character's name in the AD after 10 minutes  worth of the movie has passed, there have already been 2 significant scenes in which the character has played a major role ...

QuoteOh yeah, character should be named right away if they've already appeared in a prior installment of the series. Anything else is just silliness.

QuoteUnless it's meant to be a twist I don't think anyone will complain if you use a name whereas some people don't like the ambiguit

So there's some mixed views there. I feel like there's a general acceptance of the practice, but with a caveat that there should be flexibility in it too.

Now, there are actually standards for Audio Description, which is one reason this rule is consistently applied.

For example, here's the Netflix Audio Description Guidelines (https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/215510667-Audio-Description-Style-Guide-v2-3).

Of course, the guidelines vary between production companies and geographical locations ... but not by that much.

Regarding the naming of characters, it has this to say:

Quote

• Ideally, characters should remain unnamed until introduced through dialogue or plot-point. However, characters can be named when they first appear if they are part of pop culture or when necessary for timing and clarification, as well as to identify characters in a large group.
  
  • Do not name characters if they are purposefully supposed to remain unknown.
  • When naming characters for the first time before they are introduced through dialogue, aim to include a descriptor before the name (e.g., "a bearded man, Jack").

These guidelines do give a little flexibility, especially for larger casts. So maybe, in a film that has a large number of functionally identical characters, I'll start to relax the rules a bit as I go ...

Thanks!

Not naming the prisoners until they're named in the movie will create exactly the level of confusion and inability to connect with the characters as the sighted experience, so I feel it's very appropriate with this film.

Hope all goes well.

Quote from: BlueMarsalis79 on Dec 11, 2023, 04:42:54 AMHope all goes well.

Current time-code I'm up to is 01:39:36,428, so well over half-way. And it's in pretty rough shape, symptom of having to try and work out whats happening sometimes and which bald guy in a flaming tunnel is which character. It'll need a second pass. But I'm finding a lot to enjoy about the film, and I'm very dedicated to getting the tone of it right and to bring it alive.

This is thoroughly fascinating.

Please keep us updated!

As an independent audio describer (and one reasonably new to the process) I do quite a lot of research and study. "Watching" audio described films is part of that process, and I study films from various genres in a critical way to find out what tone they take, and how they solve various problems.

Alien 3 presents me with some challenges: it is quite a slow paced film (especially compared to its predecessor), it's largely set in anonymous and poorly-defined industrial spaces, and populated by characters that are visually very similar.

So to help get a feel for how to tackle these problems, especially when it comes to the editing process later on, I've been reviewing some other films.

One of those is 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It is damn fine cinema, with art-film visuals and ground-breaking special effects which still look amazing today. But it is extremey glacial in its pacing, and sparse with its dialouge (it is more than 10 minutes -- and a 4 million year jump-cut! -- before we get even a single line). With that, it has something in common with Alien 3.

I started to feel a little sorry for both the script writer and narrator: the narration is almost the entire continual run-time of the film, so it must have been quite a hefty script, and a long studio session. It really is extremely well done though, with the pacing allowing some quite detailed and eloquent descriptions. I particularly enjoyed the likening of Discovery's long segmented mid-section to "vertebrae".

That said, the narrator has a lot of extremely specific things to describe -- shots, technology, ships, people, landscapes; in Alien 3 there's far less visual variety. Still, I'm soaking it up and puzzling it out, and feeling like I will expand the description later with more texture and more detail.

Other films I've got cued up to try and get a feel for how I'm going to approach editing Alien 3 are a version of the original Alien (unfortunately, while there are 3 different versions, none of them are amazing and the sound quality is poor) and Blade Runner 2049 (both films of which have significant sections set in industrial factory-like spaces).

Hooray! Now finished version 1 of the script.

It weighs in at 7,374 words over 785 cues (excluding the end credits).

It's a very, very rough first draft of the script. At some point it stopped being a script and became a series of bookmarks like "Prisoner X??? does a thing". The last "lure the alien into the lead mould" was quite confusing in its geography, and very muddy which characters were where at any given time.

That said, I have a good sense of the film now, and the pacing and I know what I need to work on to bring it up to a production ready script.

It must be said, I vastly preferred and enjoyed the Alien 3 Assembly Cut over the Theatrical. It's still not perfect, but it's a much stronger film, with more defined and interesting characters. The single "runner" alien also has a lot more "presence" and power than the anonymous hordes in ALIENS. Overall, it's raised my estimation of the film by a significant margin, to the point where I can comfortably feel it's worthy film, and, in its own way, as strong and interesting as the first two films.

I'll sock drawer the script and work on some other projects for a couple of weeks to get some distance from it. Inevitably -- unless anyone has any questions or comments -- this thread will be on hiatus for a little while.  8)

... and I'm back.  8)

I see I wrote the Alien 3 script in December 2023, and I was going to put it away for about a month. But this is not my day-job, and my day job became extremely complicated for a while, and I needed to put in a lot of extra hours/days.

And then I wound up script editing unofficial AD scripts for the first two series (20 episodes) of Disney's The Secrets of Sulphur Springs, which surprised me in that it actually wasn't a bad time-travel-in-a-haunted-hotel show. That took some time.

And I had a holiday. I live on a farm, so we've had berry harvests, pear harvests, and taken honey from our bees. And gained 2 new dogs!

I also wrote and produced an Audio Introduction for Aliens, which I'll write a little about and post when it's "done" done. Really happy with the way that turned out.

So, I'm going to start revising this week, and make a few notes here as I do.

I estimate it'll take me about a month to get through (again, not my day-job).

As I said before, AMA if anything particularly intrigues you.

Ambitious project of yours, and a lot of work, respect man !

I also never understood the blood soaking shot, but I love it !

Revision! The "kill your darlings" phase of a project.

I'm not going to revise in a linear way, because when you get to the end of a project you're always more fatigued that when you begun. It follows then that the last quarter of the script will benefit the most from fresh eyes.

However, I am beginning with the opening because the interspersing of the credits and the vignettes make it a particular challenge. I want to make sure it actually works before I get to anything else.

I did a "diff" of the draft (left) and the revisions (right), and you can see I've mostly removed words, or simplified things.

(https://brett.coulstock.id.au/images/alien3/alien3-007-revision.jpg)

You can see I've removed the awkward repetition of "sleep"/"hypersleep", removed syllables from "machine housing" to "support strut", and such-like.

Read out a couple of lines to yourself and see what they sound like!

As I write and revise, I'm continually subvocalising these lines to myself.

This is going to be my world for quite some time.

The proof is in the pudding!


I was really wanting to know if it would work, or whether it would need a re-think. Kyle generously recorded the credits, the first 4:30 of the film, to see how it played. It's dense, but I think it works just fine.

It gives me the confidence to keep going with the rest.

"The ADNA Presents ..." is a podcast that interviews people involved in audio description. If you're interested in my work here, I'd encourage you to listen to even half of this episode:


It's really good. It effectively captures a blind person's experience and feeling of inclusion when watching film and television and even live events via audio description, and the difference between good and bad audio description.

It's the sort of thing that makes me more determined to do the best possibe job!

A little slow going, and I lost a week and a bit due to travel. I'm now 45 minutes in.

It strikes me that I've never actually discussed the how I'm actually doing what I'm doing. I've never posted my set up.

Fundamentally, audio description is someone narrating the movie in between dialogue and important sound, so it follows that writing audio description requires defining a video in-point, an out-point, and the text to be narrated timed to fit that gap.

For example, the creature-birth/funeral happens around the half-hour mark of the Assembly Cut:

Quote00:29:59,130 --> 00:30:03,850
Dillon and the prisoners raise their fists. In the abattoir, the newborn alien opens its razor jaws, and the inner jaw slides out.

(This is an unedited cue. "Razor jaws"? That's what revision is for. Also not spellchecked yet, and it sorely needs it).

What's fantastic about that is that it's functionally the same process as adding subtitles! These two activities map cleanly onto each other. The difference is that with subtitling, you subtitle when people are talking and with audio description, you write when people are not talking.

The upshot of this is you can use subtitle software to write audio description!

And there are loads of free subtitle editors.

I use "subtitld" which has a nice interface, and works on Linux, which is my native ecosystem.

(https://brett.coulstock.id.au/images/alien3/alien3-008-subtitld.jpg)

The interface, broken down, is:

• The video on the right
• The time-line and audio wave-form at the bottom, along with the cues.
• On the left is a list of all the cues
• At the bottom, an editing pane for the currently selected cue.

Pretty much you identify a gap in the dialogue, make a new cue, drag it so it doesn't extend over any dialogue or essential sound, and then start typing.

Then, 7,500 words later, boom! You have an Alien 3 script.  8)

Thanks for the write-up, @NecronomIV ! Quite insightful and fascinating, also very nice of you to put your time and effort into such a project

@NecronomIV  would it be beneficial to have an SRT of the film to see where dialogue is, so you could more quickly identify where it isn't?

Quote from: SiL on May 04, 2024, 08:16:28 AM@NecronomIV  would it be beneficial to have an SRT of the film to see where dialogue is, so you could more quickly identify where it isn't?

That is an excellent question from someone who has clearly given it some thought.

Actualy subtitles don't really help, except on occasion to clarify a bit of dialogue or how to name an object or character. However, I suspect it may come in useful when they come to using AI to analyse material and identify gaps and the general intent of a scene.

Now, yes, you could create a tool that does the math and discovers significant gaps and pre-creates spaces to add the narration in, but it would be a very blunt instrument and not sensitive to the soundtrack of the film, and would likely create a lot of spaces that would be un-needed.

I'm not sure AI will ever replace human describers — there's a sort of poetry and brutal efficiency that I suspect an AI just wouldn't get — but if they do, subtitle files will be part of what they feed to it to get it to work I'm sure.

Existing audio description may also form part of a data-set to train AI understand to understand movie visuals and context. Such data-sets already exist, such as MAD (https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.00431).

Great question.

@NecronomIV

Sorry, I don't think I've made myself at all clear.

You said

QuotePretty much you identify a gap in the dialogue,

What I'm asking is if it would be useful to have an SRT file of just dialogue so you could identify those gaps automatically.

For example, I have transcripts generated in Premiere of just the dialogue in all of the movies. Would such a file help in streamlining identifying those gaps, or is there already a simple system?

Quote from: SiL on May 04, 2024, 09:44:48 AM@NecronomIV

Sorry, I don't think I've made myself at all clear.

You said

QuotePretty much you identify a gap in the dialogue,

What I'm asking is if it would be useful to have an SRT file of just dialogue so you could identify those gaps automatically.

For example, I have transcripts generated in Premiere of just the dialogue in all of the movies. Would such a file help in streamlining identifying those gaps, or is there already a simple system?

No, not really. As I said, you could do the math and map all the possible gaps (if, that is, the subtitles were perfectly aligned with the dialogue) but it wouldn't be sensitive to other parts of the soundtrack such as sound effects and important music cues.

The other problem would be that you'd have more of thes gaps than you need - you don't fill up every single gap, that's fatiguing for the listener, like having an annoying person chattering in your ear the whole time ... and you seldom use all of a gap, just what you need (either at the beginning, middle or end).

So in theory yes... ish. The idea is sound. In practice, rather than automating a job, it would give you too much to sift through, and slow you down. But as I said, it's the kind of thing that might be useful input for an AI.

Finding the gaps is the easy bit, and is generally quite an intuitive and organic thing. The tricky bit is the writing, and deciding what to include and what to leave out.