Title
Audio description of music video "Flutua". A mix of gender fluid, transgender and transrespect
Conference name
Arsad 2019
City
Country
Spain
Modalities
Date
20/04/2019
Abstract
According to the Trans Murder Monitor (TMM) annual report 2016, Brazil had 868 murders of trans and gender-diverse people between 1 January 2008 and 30 June 2016. It is the country with the highest absolute number of reported murder worldwide, a fact that demonstrates not only a shocking and shameful reality faced in a nation full of discrepancies but it is also a worrisome data since the same report shows that the transmigrants in Europe who are murdered more often are also from Brazil. One way of calling the attention to this sad reality is producing audiovisual products which advocate the transrespect and fight against homophobia and transphobia. However, as far as we know, the same video producers who decided to use the art to debate the transrespect are not aware about media accessibility. The main goal of the presentation is to show some challenges in the process of audio describing a Brazilian music video called Flutua (Flew) produced and performed by Johnny Hooker with a special participation of the Brazilian trans Liniker.
The seven-minute music video presents an outstanding visual narrative involving contemporary themes such as gays with disability, fluid gender and homophobia. During the video a gay deaf couple spends a day with friends using Brazilian sign language to communicate in a scenario composed by known streets and spots of Sao Paulo capital. Despite being deaf, the group dances together on the streets of Sao Paulo and inside a night club up to the end of the night when a member of the group suffered a very violent attack. Our presentation will be focused in some challenges of audio describing the most relevant scenes, the outfit of the singers/performers, their movements while keeping the music as protagonist of the music video. Luckily Flutua has 70 seconds of silence during its most important scene. This fact allowed the insertion of an audio description that had to be at the same time precise and concise in order to keep the suspense and sensitiveness of that moment. As a final result we produced an audio introduction for the video and some extracts of audio description. Our theoretical support was composed by Fryer and Romero-Fresco (2014), Butler (2014), Szarkowska and Orero (2014) and Caldas (2013).
The seven-minute music video presents an outstanding visual narrative involving contemporary themes such as gays with disability, fluid gender and homophobia. During the video a gay deaf couple spends a day with friends using Brazilian sign language to communicate in a scenario composed by known streets and spots of Sao Paulo capital. Despite being deaf, the group dances together on the streets of Sao Paulo and inside a night club up to the end of the night when a member of the group suffered a very violent attack. Our presentation will be focused in some challenges of audio describing the most relevant scenes, the outfit of the singers/performers, their movements while keeping the music as protagonist of the music video. Luckily Flutua has 70 seconds of silence during its most important scene. This fact allowed the insertion of an audio description that had to be at the same time precise and concise in order to keep the suspense and sensitiveness of that moment. As a final result we produced an audio introduction for the video and some extracts of audio description. Our theoretical support was composed by Fryer and Romero-Fresco (2014), Butler (2014), Szarkowska and Orero (2014) and Caldas (2013).