April 22, 2025 - 11:25
When reading Blind Imagination: Pictures into Words, I found myself disagreeing with the filmaker that said, "The problem is that every image would take so many words to descibe adequetaely, that there would be no way that the audio description could keep up with the action." I feel like this is silly to say because movies have scripts that describe whats, importantly going on visually, outside of the dialogue and are a really good condesed written description of most movies and plays. If a script is changed to be a better audio description than I think it is enough to have that available to people. I remember reading Romeo and Juliet in highschool and I understood the scenes without having to see them visually. I would argue most modern movies don't have a lot going on visiually because less is more, is often what I think modern movies go for. Sometime the movies are so visually dark they are hard to see whats going on anways, so I don't think movies are too complex for audio description especially since most movies have scripts. I think kids movies and animations are harder because they actually have more complex visual scenes since kids don't care as much for dialogue and are entertained more visually.
Comments
response to discussion-Arianna Callender
Submitted by acallender on May 6, 2025 - 14:42 Permalink
I see where you're coming from, and I agree that saying it's "impossible" to describe visual scenes adequately with words feels like an overstatement. You're right that movie scripts already contain detailed visual directions, and with thoughtful adaptation, they can certainly be transformed into effective audio descriptions. Your point about understanding Romeo and Juliet through text alone is a great example of how powerful language can be in conveying scenes.
That said, I think the filmmaker might have been highlighting the challenge of timing rather than the possibility of describing everything. In fast-paced scenes with lots of visual action, there may not be enough quiet moments to insert audio descriptions without overlapping dialogue or disrupting the flow. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing—just that it takes careful planning and creativity.
I also thought your observation about kids’ movies being more visually complex is really interesting—animations do often rely heavily on visual storytelling, which might make them trickier to describe fully in real time.