Audio describing Ocean’s Eleven scene 12 out of context: decision points in AD drafting

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drafting an audio description script for a short excerpt from a film is often presented as an early didactic task to students. It is presumed to be a simpler exercise than describing a film in its entirety. Is that really the case? How can the challenges of audio describing out of context illuminate AD processes and inform AVT and with what training implications? This article takes the opportunity of what would be a most unusual brief for an AD professional – dealing with a single film scene presented out of its full cinematic context and as a text transcript only – to consider these questions. They are addressed introspectively exposing the thought process behind drafting AD, using autoethnography. Exploring how context affects the decision-making process of the professional describer, highlights the importance of the initial stages of the workflow and the prerequisites of an AD task. It argues that students should be provided not only with the scene itself but also with a description brief outlining the circumstances of the translation. Ultimately it illustrates that a task often set for beginners is not so simple as it seems.