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Roaring Girl Productions is developing new approaches to film accessibility, working to make audio description, captioning and sign language interpretation (ACS) an integral part of the production process so that people with sensory impairments can participate fully as audience members.
(Audio description is an audio narration of visual elements for audiences with a visual impairment. Captioning transcribes/annotates and sign language interpretation interprets audio information for Deaf/hearing impaired audiences.)
Not satisfied with traditional ACS, which often undermines the vision of the film, the company is experimenting with a new approach. On its most recent film Nectar, ACS is built into the process from the very start of development and through to distribution.
Writer-Director Liz Crow explains: “What I wanted to do was get away from the traditional approach where, although there’s this whole range of genres, it’s as though there’s a one-size-fits-all template that you’re supposed to squash your film into. It does no favours to the audience or the filmmaker. If the job of access is to convey the story and the emotional content of a film, then you need to take those access measures and adapt them to the specific film. And that’s what we’re trying to do on Nectar.”
Funded by NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), Films at 59 and Arts & Business, the company is now trialling their approach at film festivals around the world, where they are finding it to be high quality, reliable, cost-effective and responsive to different types of film.
Roaring Girl Productions is also building its website as a practical resource on ACS, streaming film clips which demonstrate their new approach and publishing a paper about its design and technology so that other filmmakers can replicate or adapt what has been learned.
A DVD is soon to be released of Nectar, plus three-part documentary Making Nectar about how the production of Nectar was made inclusive, including the approach to ACS. Liz Crow
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Roaring Girl Productions uses new media technologies to bring to the big screen fresh representations of deaf and disabled people. But as an activist media company, we are also asking how we can take the power of media to communicate – stories, experiences, ideas, meaning – and harness its full potential and use if as a trigger for change. Our goal is to make high quality work, but then to take audiences beyond the simple telling of a story, to look at how they can be informed and inspired to take action by applying the ideas and practices from our films.
Our most recent production, Nectar is a 16-minute drama, set in 1931 and telling the story of a young deaf champion swimmer who suddenly realises the dream he is following is not his own. As he journeys back towards swimming for the love of it, so too he journeys towards a language of his own.
We have released Nectar on DVD, along with three-part documentary Making Nectar. The documentary uses behind the scenes footage, storyboards, archive material and audition tape to entertain and inform. It shows how Nectar brings to the screen a fresh representation of disabled people, raises the curtain on the rollercoaster of the shoot, and demonstrates how innovative approaches make the film accessible to audiences with a sensory impairment. The DVD has audio description, captioning and BSL interpretation throughout.
The DVD is both a learning package and an entertaining, thought-provoking drama that is of value to schools and higher education, media courses, production companies, community film organisations, policy bodies, production facilities houses, independent filmmakers, disabled people’s organisations and equalities trainers.
Liz Crow
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