Volunteers help visually impaired enjoy a night out at the movies
Print Edition
At 0:51, he stopped his bicycle and took off his black leather gloves. At 1:06, a thin man in a black coat, who looks like a thief, took off his helmet. At 2:53, early next morning, Mr Six was walking his birds.
This all describes special footage of Chinese movie “Mr Six” designed for blind people.
The footage was created by volunteers from a university in Harbin, capital of northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province.
With volunteers reading the audio descriptions, visually-impaired people can enjoy the movie at the cinema despite not being able to see the screen.
Liu Yiwei is among 75 volunteers from Heilongjiang University engaged in the process.
The journalism and communication major says they have to watch footage at least 10 times before writing the descriptions.
“We describe in words the scenes, moves, facial expressions and other details of movie characters that are not included in actors’ lines to give the blind audience the visual information,” Liu said.
She says they usually need one month to finish a movie.
The audio description of an ordinary movie usually has more than 10,000 words, and for literary and artistic movies such as “Coming Home,” a historical drama directed by Zhang Yimou, they wrote about 20,000 words.
Starring Gong Li and Chen Daoming, the movie tells the story of an intellectual who tries but fails to reunite with his wife when he is transferring from one labor camp to another in the early 1970s.
He returns home three years later only to find that his wife now suffers from amnesia.
To avoid disturbing the audience, the volunteers have to pay attention to the length and intervals of their sentences.
“We have to interpret the visual information into words, and at the same time keep the movie characters’ lines heard without being disturbed by our words, which is actually difficult,” she said.
“We should be extremely careful for action movies, like the blockbuster ‘Wolf Warrior 2,’ as the rhythm of our words is critical as fight scenes shift very quickly,” she added.
To test the effect, Bi Xinyue, another volunteer, insists on “watching” the movie with her eyes closed.
The movies, shown once every month, draw about 50 visually-impaired people each time.
“Their laughter and applause make us feel all our efforts are worth it,” Bi said.
China has about 13 million visually impaired people, but movies for the blind are rare.
According to Heilongjiang provincial library, where the movies are shown, volunteers have described 13 movies since May 2016, drawing 1,000 blind people in total.
The library’s Xia Ximing said: “The movies have attracted blind people to step out of home and experience a colorful life through movies.”
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