Skip to 0 minutes and 2 seconds FutureLearn and Royal Holloway University presents Creating Audio Description– Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. Hello. I’m Hannah Thompson from Royal Holloway. I’m a white woman in my late 40s. I’m wearing a black dress, and I’m carrying a white cane. In film, television, and theatre, a huge range of professionals from casting directors to costume designers, makeup artists to location managers, spend a lot of time and money creating the perfect look for their production. An important part of this work is ensuring that the rich diversity of 21st century society is captured on stage and screen. Representing people of different ages, genders, races, and body shapes, as well as disabled and nondisabled people is at the heart of inclusive casting. I’m a translation studies specialist.
Skip to 1 minute and 11 seconds I’m partially blind, and I’m passionate about audio description. Join me in this course as we explore how to describe diversity. We will ask what is at stake when we choose to describe or to not describe an actor’s physical appearance. There are several ways to describe this image. We could say that it shows a person in three different poses, using their hands to cover first their ears, then their eyes, then their mouth. But what happens if we say it’s a Black person, or a Black woman, or a young, Black woman? The language we choose to use matters because every word creates a different impression. Every word carries a range of meanings which are often unwittingly communicated to audio description users.
Skip to 2 minutes and 2 seconds Join me in this course as we explore how audio description can navigate these pitfalls in ethical and inclusive ways. Royal Holloway University, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and VocalEyes.
