Process Notes on Creative Audio Description for Time:Distance

Thoughts from Gayathiri Kamalakanthan and Joseph Rizzo Naudi on making, listening, sculpting.

Here, we are sharing some notes on making the creative audio description (CAD) for/from Holly Antrum’s film Time:Distance (2012), which you can watch with or without audio description until the end of March.

As of today, you have one week left to watch/listen!

The film without audio description is here.

The film with audio description is here.

The durationa

l description, linked above, is not the on under discussion in these process notes, which we are terming a ‘Creative Audio Description’.

The Creative Audio Description was written by Gayathiri Kamalakanthan and produced by Joseph Rizzo Naudi of DesCript. This work will be published in Still Point Journal, and on this newsletter in the coming weeks. This work was the result of a form of collaborative audio description, in which Holly Antrum and Char Heather described the opening few minutes of Time:Distance with Joseph asking questions and facilitating the conversation. A recording of this discussion was then sent to Gayathiri, who, with feedback from Joseph, produced a text that creatively responded to the recording. Neither Joseph nor Gayathiri watched the film, in the traditional sense, whilst producing this text.

The following process notes come from the transcript of recorded conversation about the process of making these descriptions between Gayathiri and Joseph. The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Process notes with Gayathiri and Joseph

Joseph: I’m amazed that it didn’t occur to me just how much time it would take to describe what would be thought of as a short film, under 12 minutes. Just how much time it would take to describe it using the collaborative process that we used with the methodology that I’ve been working on.

With hindsight, I can’t believe I thought that it would work in an hour-long session. We did three minutes. And we were still just getting into the surface of things and starting to explore our responses.

I think what that then resulted in, through the process of working with Holly, working with Char as well, was an understanding for me that the practice of collaborative description as it is facilitated in this particular method is its own form. Which again seems like a very obvious thing to say.

But I think that personally I’m coming from a background where I’m still learning just how much a part of, if not all of, form is in fact the process that’s used to make it. We’re just often quite unconscious of those processes. And so we take the form that things come in almost for granted, whereas of course they are the result of so many causes and effects, ways of doing things.

So it was great to realize that the method could then be passed and used by, in this case, a writer, a poet, to create something again in a different form, which used that material in some way and made it accessible to people who weren’t part of that conversation.

I love that and I love how the two audio descriptions are different art forms in some way, different forms that we’ve been working with and bouncing from one to the other, being influenced by one thing and creating another thing.

Gayathiri: The first time I did this was with Daisy James’s work. I think that’s important to mention because it gave me the confidence to do it this time round. And I was less apprehensive about the process and whether something would emerge. I was quite trusting in the recording that I got and in Joe, as an editor and collaborator. I really felt quite safe in trying something, having not engaged with the film directly myself.

I think at first, when you hear what the process will be, as a writer, you think, can I generate something interesting or useful? The word useful is very subjective, but I found that what I was able to generate is not something I could do without this blind-led process. I’ve not written like this before. It really opened up a practice to me, opened a door. I’m now really keen to keep doing this sort of creative, experimental description of artwork in the future. And I think that’s a huge thing to be able to say. I have the confidence to trust in this process. There’s no fixed expectation of an outcome. We don’t know what the shape will be. We don’t know if it will be a script or poem or more prosaic story. You just don’t know. And I think that is a brilliant thing.

Joseph: I feel like in some ways what we did, all of us together, this project is a kind of game where me, Char and Holly watched something, talked about it and recorded that conversation, and we passed it to you.

You made something from it. It’s like a parlour game which you can play, and it isn’t, in some ways, focused on access, disability, disability justice or blindness gain. And a part of me really likes that because it means that it’s concentrating on fun. It’s concentrating on people vibing with each other, people really working with the whole of each other in some way and not breaking ourselves down into analysed parts and intersections. But then, of course, having the lens of disability and access is important. This practice wouldn’t exist without those elements.

I feel like part of my role as the blind person, the person who describes himself as blind, was to be almost encouraging and permissive in terms of what could be done in terms of description, what would be useful regarding description. It’s the confident position where I can basically say yes to things because I’m involved in the process in a way which there is executive power within it, to use a slightly strange term. I mean that I think with a lot of access initiatives and projects within this kind of space, gallery spaces, performance and event spaces, if there isn’t, in the case of audio description, a blind person in that inner circle of decision making and with power, then there’s a huge amount of guesswork and people tend to err on the side of the caution because they’re interested in making something useful which respects and enhances the blind experience.

I feel like this process really shows what can happen when there is that kind of confidence to push boundaries because there’s someone who is the audience, so to speak, involved in the creative process. For my part, that means that I also have to be aware that I’m going to be very different to many other people who describe themselves as blind in that sort of intersectional way. That’s a challenge which I need to be aware of when I’m working.

Gayathiri: I listened a few times to the recording [of Char and Holly describing the work with Joseph] whilst I was walking or doing kitchen tidy up, you know, and noting down timestamps and phrases that I thought were pinging out to me. That’s very useful for me to have a document full of sentences. I think if ever I felt, oh, I don’t know how to start or I don’t know where this is going or I don’t know what the through line is. I just thought, keep writing in these little fragments and at some point they will come together.

There’s a book called The Anthropologists which I think is important because I was reading it at the time and the way that it’s structured is with interesting titles like ‘Meaning Making’ or ‘Familiar Objects’. And there was a narrative through line, but also each sort of paragraph, each section, was complete on its own. And I liked that style and I thought it could work for this because each image that was being described could be its own story, but also they were part of a whole. So it feels serendipitous that I was reading that book at the time.

I checked in with Joe if that sort of style felt good. Sometimes it’s just really nice to have some encouragement on the other side, you know, for someone to be like, yeah, go for it. That sounds great. And then because I think when there’s just silence and your own sort of self doubt, you can get quite bogged down in it.

To have someone remove that weight of self doubt and say, oh, we’re actually in this together, kind of removes that pressure. And then if I’m being honest, I think once I like I’m in a sort of typing flow or I think, oh, that image around the wooden table with the green candle, or whatever it is, I can almost tap into the semantic field of the piece. There’s some kind of, I don’t want to call it magic, but there’s some kind of flow that happens where I think, oh, now the piece is letting me in and I can just follow it.

I kind of find it annoying when writers say like, oh, it sort of fell out of me. Like, that’s lucky for you. But yeah, that is what it felt like with the Daisy James’s piece and with Holly’s piece.

I guess it’s because of the recording, and me listening and generating lots of statements and questions. With Holly’s film, I researched how film is actually developed and made, and my partner happens to be a photographer so I spoke to him and that was useful to tap into that vocabulary.

So really I think the key to that flow is just getting 10 pages of writing down and then kind of moulding it. I felt like because I was being very curious about, like, each frame, but also, the characters. Like, you three [Holly, Joseph and Char] were characters in the text. I found it, I think, easier to inhabit someone else’s voice when the material was given to me. I’m not starting from nothing. That’s actually a really privileged place to start from.

Joseph: And starting from a place of language, let’s say, or a language material, rather than the film or, in other projects, lived experience that we’ve had or something we find interesting. There’s a bank of material to start to collage with, to start to make your own stuff and digest. I’m super interested in that part of the process and how you’re saying you were getting it down on the page. Lots of phrases, notes, which occurred to me as salient or interesting or which chime together, resonated with each other in some way, kind of trusting that instinct, I guess, as to what would start to work, and then working with the material almost. Is there a way in which it feels sculptural, what you’re doing and then it turns into something else after the sculpting?

Gayathiri: Yeah, I think, definitely. Because some of the hardest writing I’ve done is having to generate characters and voices and tone. And, the vocab that someone uses day to day, everyone has their own different version of that. But I already had you three being yourselves or being your characters. So now I’m sculpting a version of those characters from the recording into the text. Or, my interpretation of it. So, yeah, I think sculpting is a great way to think about it.