Alien 3 - Audio Description

[NecronomIV]

I 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:

Red 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. 

[NecronomIV]

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?



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:



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



(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.

[TC]

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

[SiL]

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.

[Kel G 426]

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.

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.

[NecronomIV]

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.

I 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:

"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, "

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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."

I 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 ...

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

Unless 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.

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:

• 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 ...

[SiL]

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.

[BlueMarsalis79]

Hope all goes well.

[NecronomIV]

Hope 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.

[DaveT937]

This is thoroughly fascinating.

Please keep us updated!

[NecronomIV]

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).

[NecronomIV]

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. 

[NecronomIV]

... and I'm back. 

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.

[BigDaddyJohn]

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

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

[NecronomIV]

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.



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.