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Eddie: Hey everyone, this is Eddie, uh from WoT Aes Veshan. I’ve got Mikah here with me.
Mikah: Hey y’all.
Eddie: And we are going to be talking… a little bit about our process for creating… uh, the audio descriptions, uh for the Wheel of Time trailer, the teaser trailer.
Mikah: Yeah.
Eddie: So, we actually got a message on our Aes Veshan twitter, from another user, uh, and they asked if we… I think if we were going to do this, or if…
Mikah: I think they asked, I think they asked if it had been done. Or if it existed.
Eddie: Yeah… They, they asked, I just pulled it up they asked, “Any way to get audio description for the trailer?” Um, so… I-I think I saw that first and immediately messaged Mikah and was like, oh my god!
Mikah: Yeah, you were the one who brought it to my attention.
Eddie: And it’s a great idea. We should do it. And… I’m not gonna lie. At first it was kinda frustrating because… it was… so the way we-we started it… was, I pulled the trailer up, and very very slowly, (slight chuckle) I mean over the course of what, three nights?
Mikah: Three or four…
Eddie: Yeah three or four nights, I… on youtube, was just playing… scene by scene, slowing the speed down on youtube, and just explaining it to Mikah.
Mikah: And I was typing out I was typing out what he described on my computer, in the moment, while he was talking.
Eddie: And-and not even always that. Sometimes it was just like, okay before you type… let me tell you, boomboomboomboomboom this happens…
Both at once:
Eddie: What do you think we should say?
Mikah: And then we’d have to go back…
Mikah: Yeah, and then we’d have to go back and actually write what he’d just described… so he had to describe it at least twice in those cases.
Eddie: And sometimes, we were… nitpicking, and…
Both at once:
Eddie: All this and that…
Mikah: Getting caught up in the details…
Eddie: Right, (chuckle) and, oh my god the times where I would slow it down to point 25 speed on youtube, and then going, ok well it looks like this happens and I’m-I’m noticing all these details because I am just, so hyper-focused on, what do we need to include? And then I would go back to normal speed, and turns out the whole second was like… the whole scene was one second. (Both Eddie and Mikah chuckle) And I was like, there’s no way even in sort of the normal… the normal viewing of this trailer that… you know someone’s gonna notice this super tiny detail inn the background, like, so… yeah. We-we were trying to get that. While I looked into… did quite a bit of reading on audio descriptions in general, Mikah obviously has some experience with them. I don’t know if you wanna talk about that a little bit, Mikah.
Mikah: Uh yeah, uh, my experience with audio descriptions comes from actually having to use it on movies and TV shows and stuff. So I was able to tell Eddie some things just based on my experience as… a viewer/listener… um of these, various things that I had… um… watched with audio description. And so I could be like… sometimes it’s worded like this in descriptions, or saying that the screen goes to black is acceptable, because I have heard it done in actual descriptions before. So I was able to give some… real world firsthand experience (slight chuckle) to what we were trying to do.
Eddie: Yeah and that was really helpful because… like I said I had done some reading, but I was also questioning like, is this too much? Is this not enough? How… are we doing this? And… I wanna read some examples here. We have, the first version that Mikah typed up and did some small editing on before sending it to me, and then, I… read through it again, and because uh we had at this point you know gone through the trailer so many times, I-I remembered a lot of the scenes and so I was like, well actually this happens, and we did a lot of *major* editing on the second version together.
Mikah: Mhmm.
Eddie: Um, and I wanna find-do you remember one of the parts…
Mikah: Uhhh, the part with Egwene in the pool and the colors of paint. That’s something we changed.
Eddie: Yes yes. (muttering) Let me, where is that… (speaking normally) So,… like Mikah said, one of the scenes that we had a big… problem with kind of going back and forth and saying, what details should we put? How should we word this, to best describe it? Was the scene where Egwene emerges from the pool. In the first version, that sentence read, “The next scene shows Egwene emerging from a pool with rocks behind her, and the seven ajah colors arranged in a spoke around her. She has various colors of paint on her face and dress as she emerges.”
Mikah: And the way that we ch-the-the thing we changed it to sounds *so* much better than whatever that sentence was.
Eddie: Yeah, (he and Mikah chuckle) Quite-quite choppy, quite, ugh.
Mikah: Yeah.
Eddie: Uh, so the-the sentence now, or as we published it reads, “The next scene shows a pool of water with rocks behind it. The colors of each ajah float on the surface in lines emanating from the center, where Egwene emerges. She has various colors of paint on her face and dress.”
Both at once:
Mikah: It’s so much more…
Eddie: So much smoother!
Mikah: Yeah. So much smoother, so much more concise, it makes more sense… (small laugh)
Eddie: And then when we did our final read through, just hey, we’ve gone through all the little tiny bits of editing, um let’s do a big read through before our next phase of editing… Oh my god we both… (laugh)
Mikah: Yeah.
Eddie: Just, this sounds so good, it’s gonna be so good.
Mikah: Yeah, it sounds so good, it’s so exciting, like… Eddie literally read through the entire script, as if it was… you know, without any stops or anything, and… as soon as he finished, I was like, holy shit! That sounds like an actual audio description I would hear, on a real movie or TV show or something. So…
Eddie: And that-that honestly made me feel good. Like we did good.
Mikah: Yeah. We did.
Eddie: So the next step was us reviewing, sort of block by block on the trailer, as we presented it. Uh but we wanted to just focus on each section to make sure the flow of each section was good. So I would read the scene, then play the video that portion of the video, and then just discuss it with Mikah and make sure that, you know we weren’t missing any details, that we didn’t, you know… And I think in this phase is actually where we caught… the one where Stepin is kissing the ring, and I said oh by the way, he’s got a big fat teardrop running down his-his left cheek out of his eye.
Mikah: That is where you noticed it.
Eddie: Yeah and you-you were like yeah, let’s definitely include that. So that was just an interesting… kind of… The whole process has been very interesting and… you know very… I would say a little bit tedious? Uh because we were bouncing it off each other, but it was just part of the process. Not necessarily in a bad way, it just took it was time-consuming.
Mikah: Yeah. And you had to do most of the work. (faint chuckle)
Eddie: Yeah, well, but-but that’s also why we-why we did this so that (small chuckle) you know, people who are visually impaired or blind could enjoy it without… you know necessarily having to have random friend groups, or… or duos sit there and do the same thing over and over. And there’s definitely, so so many details that you see in a lot of the breakdowns that like The Dusty Wheel, and Daniel Greene, and all these other content creators are showing, and… that’s you know a big stream. We weren’t trying to go into that level. We were trying to capture as much of the essence of the trailer as possible.
Mikah: Yeah, cause at one point, Eddie was talking about details he noticed. And I said if we talk about all the details, this video’s gonna be two and a half hours long. (both Eddie and Mikah chuckle) And, that’s not what we’re looking for at this point. We just want to get across what’s happening, even if it is… a little… more general, and leaves out a lot of the minor details, that’s what other… discussions on twitter and other youtube videos and stuff are for. So, we had our job to do, and we did it well.
Eddie: Yeah. I-I think so. And… (small chuckle) I mean it wouldn’t be The Wheel of Time if it wasn’t… you know a very long piece of work, right? (chuckle)
Mikah: Very true. (laugh)
Eddie: So taking a two minute trailer and doing… you know… bumping it up to a full 13 minutes… definitely, I think, (small chuckle) you know, very Wheel of Time in and of itself.
Mikah: Mhmm.
Eddie: But we didn’t uh, need to hit all the details.
Mikah: Yeah.
Eddie: And then after we did that, that’s when we… did a final comb through for… typos on the transcript, and making sure all of that was correct.
Mikah: Yeah. Eddie was like skimming through the google doc we had, and kinda muttering to himself as he did, and he’d say, “Moiraine, comma, Winespring Inn, comma… comma comma…” And then, (faint chuckle) I think-I think you were the one who said it first.
Eddie: Yeah. (chuckle)
Mikah: Uh, he goes, (chuckle) it’s like that song: (singing) “Comma comma comma comma comma chameleon.” (laugh) And so every time… after that, every time he said, “Comma, blahblahblah, comma,” I was going, (singing) “Comma comma comma comma comma chameleon.” And that song has been stuck in my head for the past 48 hours because of this. (laugh)
Eddie: Sorry not sorry. )both Eddie and Mikah laugh) Um, yeah it was just we wanted to make sure that capitalizations were consistent throughout,, spelling was consistent, and… Commas, Mikah pointed out, (Mikah laughs) why they’re important for screen readers. So if you wanna let them know…
Mikah: Yeah. Using commas and punctuation is really important for screen readers because, imagine if you were reading a big block of text on a screen with no line breaks, or no punctuation or anything like… That would get visually overwhelming. And it-it’s a similar thing with the screen readers. If there’s no punctuation or breaks, it gets… difficult to keep track of. And so making sure that you have commas, or periods, or other breaks, makes it more understandable.
Eddie: Right, it’s not just some run-on sentence at that point. Especially when you’re, um, the big thing you pointed out to me was when we’re doing the quotes that we had, to make sure that the quotes are… being separated when the screen reader goes over it.
Mikah: Yeah. Put a-put a comma or some kind of punctuation mark before and after any of the quotes, so it’s not just, (speaking more quickly) Moiraine’s voiceover begins with “The Wheel of Time turns.” You want, Moiraine’s voiceover begins with, “The Wheel of Time turns.”
Eddie: And I think we got all the commas, I really hope we did, because… if not, I think we’re gonna be haunted by a giant, you know, evil, (Mikah chuckles) screen reading chameleon. (Mikah bursts into laughter, and Eddie joins in) That’s-that’s gonna be the-the mascot… The… the vengeful screen reading chameleon.
Mikah: Oh my god. (Mikah and Eddie both chuckle) Somebody needs to draw this now. (Mikah’s voice trails into laughter)
Eddie: Um. Yeah, and then, I… ended up staying (chuckle) up way past my bedtime. Uh, because I had taken a pain pill, and it-those usually mess with my sleep. So… I had done everything on my PC, and… I was just like, oh god, I don’t really wanna mess with trying to… download a-a video editing thing, let me… save everything to the iCloud, hop over to my mac, and… see if I can use iMovie. But I couldn’t figure out… iMovie, I think before you went to bed, Mikah, I was just… going back and forth, freaking out, going, what? I don’t-I don’t know what I’m doing! (chuckle)
Mikah: You were seriously struggling. (slight chuckle)
Eddie: So hard. And I-I’ve just, I’ve only used iMovie once before… like last year, or earlier this year to make a TikTok. Like, (laugh) it wasn’t… nearly as complicated of separating having separate audio files, and video files, and… yeah it was just like oh my god I’m gonna have to keep putting the video in here, and trimming it down, and blahblahblah, but… After Mikah went to bed, I was messaging them saying, oh my god oh my god oh my god I figured this out! Oh my god I figured that out! (laugh)
Mikah: I woke up-I woke up to like nine messages, and it was great! (Mikah and Eddie both chuckle)
Eddie: I was like, there’s a split feature on iMovie, so I could just split the-the video file, and then-and then move things around, and… it-it ended up becoming way easier as I went along. Thought I was done, I exported it, I was watching through it to make sure I didn’t mess it up, and sure enough, I messed it up. I forgot to… to split part of the video correctly, and so I had to go back in and… and put that part of the video in where I needed. And then while I was there I cleaned up some of the cuts, uh some of the scene cuts in there. We might have lost like a couple seconds of the original trailer in the process of that, but at that point I was like, I’m not going back to get a few milliseconds back for each scene, you know? Um I was just I was cutting them out, and making sure that at least the beginning of each… you know, each set of scenes was was-was good and started correctly. And then, today we got everything written up, and ready to go, and…
Mikah: You fixed the captions on the youtube video…
Eddie: Oh my god that was so annoying! (chuckle) It was another one of those things where… you know just by the nature of it, Mikah couldn’t really… you know help out, but of course I made them suffer through it. (Eddie and Mikah chuckle) And I turned my-my microphone toward my computer so to pick up the audio better, and I was just making sure the-the captions lined up and fell off the screen at the correct time… Youtube actually had a really good feature within all I had to do was paste the transcript in, and after a small hiccup, it-it was, it auto-assigned the-the different lines to different timestamps, and I was like, oh my god this is… great! And then I realized it kept the transcript over the trailer portion that we played, so I had to, you know, edit that down, and some lines were just broken up really weird! You know, it’s an algorithm… It is what it is, but we-we got that fixed up, and I was just kind of letting Mikah know what I was doing as I was doing it.
What we really wanted with this project… was to get… The Wheel of Time to be accessible to-to as many people as possible. And… I think we did that, we’ve gotten some great feedback already. We are hoping to continue on our website, adding descriptions, what the actors and actresses look like, we’ll… end up getting… the actors and actresses in costume, and putting those descriptions. Obviously costumes change pretty often, but… uh, I’m assuming for quite a bit of season one like most of the main characters are gonna have the same… travel clothes that they’re wearing. So we’ll get that updated, we started doing notable locations, like the Hall of the Tower, uh, you know a lot of things that aren’t gonna change that often that have a lot of detail. That’s what we wanna get in there.
Mikah: Yeah. When we were describing the place in the teaser trailer where we see the Hall of the Tower, we spent so long talking about, do we want to include these details? And then Eddie noticed even more later on. So we spent a lot of time just describing various aspects, like the arrangement of the daises the Aes Sedai were on. But we didn’t even touch on the pillars, or the windows, or any of the other… like the floor details, or any of that. It was just… there’s… so much. And so having… having longer descriptions written out of these places where, even in an audio description in a TV show, they won’t be able to include all the details. That’s just not how it works. And so having a more detailed description can be helpful and help people feel more… um… get more immersed in the story.
Eddie: And hopefully, with that, it’s even something we or other people could use to reference. If we say the Hall of the Tower, we have that already written down. We don’t have to keep saying it over and over. You know we could tell people, hey, go reference the website, and read through, and we will update it you know if-if the location changes, or if there’s any major events there. Spoilers be ware. We’re not gonna go into that on what locations might change. (slight chuckle)
Mikah: (slight chuckle) Yeah, I thought of a few. (chuckle)
Eddie: And hopefully, we get… you know the Wheel of Time… uh official account and Amazon Prime to… to actually pick this up themselves. Definitely for the show, hopefully also for the next trailer that they release. There’s-there’s a theory that they’ll release on October 8th when they are at the New York Comiccon panel.
Mikah: We’ll just have to wait and see. Or, in my case, wait and listen. (laugh)
Eddie: Right. So, we’ll see what happens, and if the next trailer drops and they don’t release it with audio descriptions, then we will do the same thing with that, and go through it, and hopefully get it out a little bit sooner this time.
Mikah: And if it’s longer, it might take longer, so we’ll just have to wait and see.
Eddie: Right.
Mikah: We’ll just have to go with whatever happens.
Eddie: I-I’m really hoping that the next trailer, even if it’s longer, has longer scenes in it that we can break up easier.
Mikah: Yeah.
Eddie: That we don’t have to describe a bunch of rapidly changing scenes. So we can maybe do an inline audio description depending on what audio they have in it…
Mikah: Mhmm.
Eddie: Uh, and if not, we’ll just we’ll do what we did with this one.
Mikah: Yep. We’ll just have to… work with what we have. And, it’ll be worth it if it means that other people get to en-enjoy something that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to. So, putting in the work is good, it’s… tiring, it takes a lot of time, but until it becomes more common, it’s just… what we have to do to make sure that everything is as accessible as possible.
Eddie: And we hope everyone enjoyed it, and got some good information out of it, and realized how important having audio descriptions, alt text, and everything that we will continue to champion as much as possible.
Mikah: Mhmm.
Eddie: So, if you haven’t watched it yet, go ahead and do it.
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