Three at Comic-Con, one on a Zoom call, another on the sidewalk. The same question in each of them, and I could only answer it in one.
All of this landed in about six weeks. Nothing was spread out. Three panels at Comic-Con, a panel at Digital Hollywood, and over 200 floats described live at San Diego Pride.
The Backup Video My Nieces Fixed
Two of my Comic-Con panelists were joining remotely. Anna Capezzera and Colleen Connor on video, Christina Stevens and Serina Gilbert in the room with me. More about the panelists here.
Conference Wi-Fi being what it is, I recorded both remote panelists in advance so I’d have something to play just in case the connection dropped.
My two nieces were with me. They watched the backup videos, told me they were great, and then told me where they’d tighten them.
Then they said that if the connection drops halfway through, those panelists will already have said some of this. Playing the whole video from the top would be too much.
So I took their advice, cut them down, and added chapters with timecode markers, so I could jump to whatever hadn’t been covered yet. I built it between panels.
When I think about their suggestion, I saw they were imagining what the room would experience at the exact moment something went wrong, and building for that person.
That’s Audio Description thinking. Neither of them does this for a living.
Redirects, In Public
At another panel, we put video on the screen and coached live.
Performers took the cues. I gave redirects. We worked toward the sweet spot in front of an audience, most of whom had never heard of Audio Description before.
The performers were open to it. Thank goodness, cause you can’t adjust a read in public unless you’re willing to be seen adjusting.
Then the room did something I hadn’t planned for. When a performer found it, the audience responded with out loud applause. They could hear the difference land in a room full of people who had no vocabulary for what they were hearing.
The performer didn’t have to take my word for it. They felt it.
I’ve described the sweet spot to performers for years. Describing it has never worked as well as a room reacting to it.
Nobody Said Anything
At Digital Hollywood last week, I played a sample of a synthetic voice and a human voice back to back to back.
Then nobody said anything.
I couldn’t read it. On Zoom you get a grid of faces, with none of the peripheral information you use in a physical room. I gotta admit I felt a wave of something next to fear.
I had made the strongest argument I know how to make, using the only evidence that persuades anyone, which is letting people hear it. And I walked out of it with no idea whether it had done anything at all.
Then I followed up with the other panelists and the moderator, and it had landed. The silence was people taking it in. Zoom is just a hard room to read.
I want to be clear that I only know that because I asked.
Grading Your Own Landing
In all three rooms, the only question that mattered was whether the difference landed for the person receiving it.
In two of the three, I couldn’t tell on my own.
My nieces told me. The audience told the performer. The moderator told me afterward.
I’ve been doing this Audio Description work for two decades and I still can’t reliably grade my own landing. The read that feels locked in is sometimes the one that drags. The demonstration that feels flat is sometimes the one that goes quiet because people are thinking.
This is why blind quality control is not a formality.
Serina Gilbert was in the room with me at Comic-Con. She calls herself an Audio Description Snob, and she has the credits to own that title. She was the first blind quality control specialist to have her name announced in the credits of The Last of Us Season 2. She reads a script, finds where it can be better, and then it gets better.
That work exists because the people making a thing can’t hear it the way the people receiving it do. Not with more effort, not with more experience. It doesn’t work that way.
When was the last time somebody told you something true about your own work that you couldn’t have arrived at yourself?
Where To Start Instead
You can’t fix this by trying harder to be objective about your own performance. That isn’t a thing.
What you can do is get honest about where you are right now, which is smaller and more useful.
I put the five things I keep returning to into a free guide for Audio Description performers. It opens with a self-assessment, which is uncomfortable and is meant to be, and each pillar has a drill you can run this week.
Nothing replaces the room. This will give you somewhere to start until you find one.
Get it here. It’s free.