We Love Our School | WA State School for Blind
From inception, the production of this film for the Washington State School for the Blind was designed to integrate audio descriptions in the post-production process. I’d never made a piece that included descriptive audio – an accessibility necessity for blind and/or visually impaired audiences. And rather than do a sort of after-market add-on of audio descriptions I had heard — a voice over delivered at high speed in order to cover whatever is needed — I wanted to plan our production in anticipation of the audio descriptions. That meant thinking about story pacing in a very different way than I had before. For example, we needed to consider how best to build in time to verbally introduce featured individuals (not just rely on lower-third text-on-screen identifications) but how to verbally introduce numerous scenes. We needed to plan for audio descriptions of scenes that would reveal a variety of visual sequences. And, I wanted the audio descriptions to be part of the art of the film making and enhance the final piece. And then of course, there was writing those audio descriptions — a very unique script writing process. I absolutely loved it. The WSSB was so incredible to work with — generous and fun collaborators, imaginative, thoughtful, wonderful guides, and willing to trust in a process that was at least somewhat new to all of us. Really thrilling to get to do this project.