Congratulations to all the winners last night at the ACB’s Audio Description Awards Gala. Kathy Bates? Wow. That’s super awesome of her. love her. I thought the whole shindig went off without a hitch, and the audio description for the audio descritpion gala was excellent. If there’s an inception version of audio description, this was it. Audio Description describing Audio Description. Where is DiCaprio? Is the top sobbing or not? Questions unanswered. And, kudos to all who won. I never realized I had no idea what Joel Snyder looked like until he was described. it really is the little things in life. Next year’s goal? Hearing my name at the end along with the 47 other ronin.
TV News: Something called Lucky 13 was cancelled by ABC. honestly, I didn’t know this was a thing, so if you did, and watched it, my sympathies.
TV Shows Watched: The Day of The Jackal: S1E1 (Peacock) with… well…. We’ll talk., Fight Night: S1E3 (Peacock) with audio description, St Dennis Medical: S1E2 (Peacock) with audio description, Jurassic World: Chaos Theory: S2E5 (Netflix) with audio description, You Would Do It Too: S1E4 (Apple Plus) with audio description, and Abbott Elementary: S4E6 (Hulu) with audio description.
Podcasts: None.
YouTube: None.
Movies Watched: Rob Peace (Netflix) with audio description, and another movie in screener form that doesn’t come out until December. I don’t want to anger the embargo Gods.
I need to get to Jackal ASAP, so you guys just know I saw Abbott, and I’m not happy. At this point, I assume nothing is ever changing, and the world enjoys the underwhelming description. I would be beating a dead horse. My favorite singular episode was the third episode of Fight Night, which really had a tense hostage theme, and much less screentime for the actor playing Ali. but, we *really* need to talk about The Day Of The Jackal. Whooooooooo Boy.
So, my blind buddies at The Dark Room really should take a look at The Day Of The Jackal’s first episode. I don’t even know where to begin. Several moments yesterday had me going “I need to text Alex. he must watch this.” But if he doesn’t have Peacock….
I normally disagree with them on performative audio description. I enjoy it. i think what Dave Wallace does for Solar Opposites is a perfect marriage of narrator to project. but this? What on God’s green earth is happening here? This is, I think we can all agree, *a lot*. This narrator, whose name I deleted from my brain likely to save him from being mentioned, enters like a wrecking ball. The script of the audio description is so dominant, so over descriptive, it borders on listening to an audio book. The beginning of this show is in another language, despite this being Eddie Redmayne’s TV show, and being produced in the UK by Sky. But, despite the presence fo Redmayne and other British actors, we have to get through this long assassination sequence in another country, and in another language. The narrator reads everything like an audio book, with a lot of “she says” and ‘he says” being thrown i there, and never changes the inflection. there’s no desire to lineup and do a word for word translation of what people are saying, sometimes he just summarizes a conversation. “He berates his wife over the phone.” I’m positive there was a better way to describe this.The first 10-15 minutes of the pilot is like this. it was such a turnoff, because I was thinking “I can’t do this the whole time.”, but I also knew this had Eddie Redmayne, and I kept waiting for that scene where we could finally dial it back a little, and then see whaat maybe the audio description would be like more regularly? The problem is, the narrator is still a bit much, it’s just that he thankfully isn’t summarizing actors speaking in English. I’m afraid for future episodes, because I do not know the balance of this show, and how globe trotting this Jackal will be. Is he going to spend the rest of his time in English speaking countries? Because, i frankly just cannot do a full series of the first 10-15 minutes of this. It is like someone heard performative audio description, and said “Hold My Beer!”
And the problem isn’t just the narrator. Even a monotone narrator would still be too interpretive. I didn’t think I’d ever reach a point where I would say the audio description is doing too much. I’ve actually previously argued that it was impossible to do that, since there are so many aspects of a film we aren’t getting, all the time. Everything from lighting to camera angles, to set design, costume design, hair and makeup, cinematography choices to do wide shots, tracking shots, keeping someone in close-up to balancing the rule of thirds. there are a constant barrage of decisions being made by craft talent (aka below the line) in every project that only occasionally gets a passing mention. even something simple like “a red dress” likely doesn’t fully grasp the hours it may have taken to recreate that period look, just for that one scene, and the audio description only has time to call it a red dress.
But I guess we could maybe include all of that if we go the way of the Jackal and just narrate the thing like a bull in a china shop. It truly felt like a wrecking ball moment, as he comes in hard and fast. And then, it just dominates. Honestly, even the balance was off, as it was hard to hear the original actors underneath, son any choices they were making, in terms of tone and inflection was lost.
The first 10-15 minutes of this might be the most interesting discussion topic we could have, dissecting it, and figuring out where it specifically went wrong, before any voice was ever added, because I believe even with a narrator who didn’t just pound a couple Red Bulls, this would still be not the right audio description.
What are your thoughts? I’m always curious. If you’ve seen Day Of the Jackal, at least the first episode, what were your thoughts? You can comment, or some of you know how to reach me directly. Is this possibly too much? Was I proven wrong? I’m ready to eat my hat on this. Maybe, it is possible, to actually have too much audio description. When you start becoming an audio book, I would say, that’s probably where the line is.