What is this about?

Please, take a seat, relax, close your eyes and listen. From the darkness comes the music. A moment of silence. A squeak. An odd whish. Click. Click. Squeak. Whish. A child’s voice repeats: „lumos maxima”. Now you can open your eyes – you have „seen” one of the first sequences of „Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”. What happened? We don’t know. Why did we watch it with our eyes closed? To understand how a visually impaired person is feeling when in cinema. Because most of us never thinks about whether those people actually go to the cinema. And we usually think that hearing is enough to find out what is happening on the screen.

Let’s try again. Take a seat, close your eyes and listen carefully. A quiet voice describes a dark room and the boy with glasses and blue pyjamas reading under his blanket. Suddenly the door opens (squeak), the boy lays down (odd whish) and pretends he’s asleep. A fat man walks into the room and turns the lights on (click), looks at the bed and turns the lights down (click). The boy dives under his blanket (odd whish), takes his wand and says: “lumos maxima”. Now you “saw” a scene from the movies with audio description.

Audio description is like painting a picture with words. It’s an additional spoken description of the most important elements of a movie scene. Its purpose it to enable visually impaired persons to gather information that others receive through their sight. The aim of the audio description is to socially integrate visually impaired persons and present to them the previously unavailable audiovisual art. Audio description covers movies, TV programmes, theatre and opera, sports, exhibitions and even fashion shows. Movie audio description is a brief additional commentary between actors’ dialogues which describes characters’ look, their mimics, place and progress of action, scenes, costumes, sounds difficult to indentify etc. This is not about telling the movie, but helping to keep up with the plot and to interpret individually some visual aspects unobtainable to visually impaired persons. This difficult task is performed by an audio descriptor, who after watching the movie as many times as he or she needs to, and reading the movie script, creates a script to be read by a lector. Creating a brief and in the same moment a figurative description is a real challenge – and the audio descriptor has to fit his script between actors’ dialogues. It is no overstatement to say that one picture may be worth at least thousand words.

Audio description was introduced in Poland in 1999. In the first years shows with audio description took place in Bialystok, Warsaw and Poznan. In Krakow for the first time screenings with audio description were presented during Etiuda&Anima 2010 thanks to the efforts of the festival’s management and Rotunda Cultural Centre. The audio description was edited by a student and graduate of Unesco Studies of Translation and Intercultural Communication at Jagiellonian University – Justyna Drożdż and Agata Psiuk in cooperation with Anna Jankowska who works at the institution. It is one of the few facilities in Poland that both performs academic studies on audio description and educates students in this field.