Titles / Opening CreditsThe titles of Alien
3 begin with an establishing shot of deep space.
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.
The titles of Alien
3 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.
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".
