Alien³ Audio Description

by Brett Coulstock. August, 2023.

Describing Alien³

While recording Aliens, Kyle suggested tackling Alien³.

Now, I don't love Alien³. I saw it in the theatre in 1992 (I still have the cinema stub) and I won't lie: I was disappointed. The saga of the troubled production is well documented, as is the director's personal dislike of the end product.

I felt, despite its many good points, it just wasn't the calibre of the first two films.

That said, we change over time, and while I think it's true that I will never love the film, I find I can definitely respect it. Killing Newt and Hicks, in face of the happy ending of previous film is perhaps cruel, but bold, wrenching the series back to the fundamental underlying nihilism of the first film. The ending, too, is extraordinary: horror being one of the few genres where you can get away dooming or doing-away with the main character without the audience outright balking at it. When the main character knows their fate, it changes the dynamic from basic survival to larger, greater issues, or shows different and fascinating facets of the character.

And there's much to admire: the music is sublime, perhaps the best score of all of them. The cast is stuffed with ridiculously excellent actors. The setting of a prison / decommissioned lead foundry is compelling. Despite Fincher's dislike of the film, he's Fincher and he was trying to make a good movie, and it shows.

And I've seen some empassioned defence of the film — especially the Assembly Cut — which makes me step back and try to see it better.

The respect I have for it means that I was willing to devote the many, many hours that were required to write an AD script, to go into the project wanting to do a great job, to bring to the surface what makes the story and characters compelling, and completes the journey of Ripley.

In the end I vastly preferred and enjoyed the Alien³ Assembly Cut over the Theatrical. It's still not perfect, but it's a much stronger film, with more defined and interesting characters. The single "runner" alien also has a lot more "presence" and power than the anonymous hordes in Aliens. Overall, it's raised my estimation of the film by a significant margin, to the point where I can comfortably feel it's worthy film, and, in its own way, as strong and interesting as the first two films.

And I must thank Kyle for his efforts, not just as narrator, but as script-editor. His feedback and editing improved the final product immeasurably.

Reflections, Challenges and Regrets

The Opening Credits

Audio Description is a lot of juggling, a lot of decision making, and a lot of compromises. Opening credits and sequences are a special example.

The titles of Alien³ consist of text credits over a scene of deep space, interspersed with scene fragments.

The credits need to be read out, and the visuals described. In Aliens, this was relatively easy, as the credits mostly were over black, or over a star-field.

Here, this is much harder. There are two main issues to consider.

The first is that a half-second of screen time can give an enormous amount of information visually. Translating even the bones of what's on screen to audio description is inevitably going to run longer than the actual visual, so the describer must be both economical and evocative and choose the most essential information to convey.

For example, the scene of the egg lasts 3 seconds, and then it's juxtaposed back to the star-field with "Paul McGann" on it.

And the cues I wrote are:

On board, anchored beneath a support strut, an alien egg, mucus dripping from its open petals.

Paul McGann.

(As an aside, don't you love that the ship's name Sulaco is embossed on a totally unimportant strut? It's ridiculous sign-posting, in a place where it'll never be noticed. One thing I love about writing AD is that you notice these kind of details).

To fit the description of the egg, the voice-over starts before the previous credit text has faded from screen.

The second problem is the interspersing of credits and action, or overlaying credits over action. This is a particular challenge, because the danger is that the two run confusingly together. Louise Fryer in her book An Introduction to Audio Description: A Practical Guide (2016) notes the audio description for The Girl with the Pearl Earring featured some outlandish and strange sentences during the credits which were shown over a series of scenes. The result of not separating the text of the credits and the description leads to sentences like this:

Griet packs a bundle in her room, takes a moment to look back, and goes to her mother, Scarlett Johansson.

The mother was not played by Scarlett Johansson, but the awkward juxtaposition suggests it. So that's something we work hard to avoid.

My first attempt at the titles was this:

It works, in the sense that both the visuals and the credits are described.

But it's busy.

I read an excellent discussion on the Facebook Audio Description Group on the challenges of describing credit sequences.

After thinking about the discussion, I rewrote the sequence, omitting most of the credits (these are now placed at the end of the film). I think you'll agree that it's now a more atmospheric and moody piece, without the rushed feeling, and suits the production much better.

Identifying the Cast

The story of Alien³ is based on a script by Vincent Ward who came up with the idea of Ripley crash landing on a wooden planet or space-station populated by a monastic community.

In the final version, this became a prison planet, populated by male prisoners who are either bald or shave their heads due to a problem with lice.

In audio description the standard is to pick a descriptor for a character until they are named in the production. So the narration might refer to “the bearded man” or “the woman with the red dress”.

In this film, the cast are all men. They are all bald, or have shaved their heads, and have no other facial hair. They all wear pretty much the same clothes.

And there's about 20 of them.

So we have a large cast and a paucity of descriptors.

The audio description for The Thing (2011) has a similar problem, in that most of the cast are Norwegian bearded guys wearing cold-weather gear. The describer largely solved the problem there with what is known as “force naming”, where the name is mentioned before it is used in the production (if at all).

I used both techniques. The major characters are mostly named pretty early on, so I went with temporary descriptors. I chose to force name some of the more minor characters, some of them sooner, some of them later, whatever felt right.

One character I used a descriptor for is named in the production literally one minute before he's killed, and I found it less distracting to keep using the descriptor instead of his name for his last moments.

There's a lot of effort and thought put into this. You might wonder what blind and low-vision people prefer. I threw out a question on Discord, and got the following responses from separate people:

“personally prefer it if a show has a bigger cast than usual or where it doesn't matter if the character is named in any way at all, mystery or otherwise for them to be named so that I can associate their voices and whatever description of theirs is given if at all in my head to begin with.”

“Probably good not to give that information until the film does, I would think, but there might be exceptional times when it might be good to do the other thing”

“I don't have strong feelings either way. Not naming them keeps closest to the intended experience, but keeping track of character names is probably easier than appearances for a lot of blind people. Also "Greg" is fewer syllables than "the brown-haired man", which matters when you need to squeeze descriptions between dialogue.”

“for people with sight, they'd usually know that X is playing Y, and if X is famous however slightly, they'd know the name anyway.”

“The sighted people might be more likely to recognise the actor by sight if it happens to be a somewhat famous person in their purview, but they wouldn't have any firmer idea of the name of the character beforehand than we would”

“I enjoy the descriptive of the technique, however a lot of the time the AD will have the same 3-5 word phrase to describe that unknown character and it gets used over and over in a short period of time. This can become annoying. I think the technique should be preserved for minor characters of something, but I really don't see the point when it comes to the major cast of a show, unless it is really needed to preserve the context of the show.”

“I see no point in not revealing a main character's name in the AD after 10 minutes worth of the movie has passed, there have already been 2 significant scenes in which the character has played a major role … ”

“Oh yeah, character should be named right away if they've already appeared in a prior installment of the series. Anything else is just silliness.”

“Unless it's meant to be a twist I don't think anyone will complain if you use a name whereas some people don't like the ambiguity.”

As they say “If you've met one blind person … you've met one blind person.”

At the end of the day, it's still a film with a large cast of functionally similar characters, so to help clarify who's who, I wrote an audio introduction, a performed piece that describes the settings, characters and other elements in more detail than the audio description is able to.

Isolated Audio Description Narration

While the scripts and the audio introduction can be released with no copyright problems, the same is unfortunately untrue when it comes to the fully mixed narration with soundtrack.

What we can also release, however, is the isolated audio description narration. If you're clever or patient, and you own the original film, you can sync up the tracks and perhaps apply some auto ducking, and have a reasonable experience.

Kyle has kindly made available his narration here:

The Scripts

This is independent audio-description: that is the scripts are unofficial and not commissioned by Disney, 20th Century Fox, or any other corporation. I believe in cultural competency, inclusion and equality, and have attempted to describe the characters and situations fairly, without prejudice and without intent to offend. All information in the scripts are believed to be correct at the time of writing, but they have not passed through a quality control process, and the accuracy or correctness of this content cannot be guaranteed.

If you have any concerns about this content, please contact me.

Copyright and Licensing

Linked audio-description scripts copyright © Brett Coulstock.

Licence for all formats: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Read my reasons why I share audio-description.

Downloads

This is for the blu-ray version of the film, running time: 2:24:52

• CSV format (for spreadsheets)
• RTF format (printable script for recording)
• HTML format (online script for recording)
• SRT format (Subtitle file for syncing text with video)
• WebVTT format (Web Video Text Tracks format)

Key

The scripts feature a number of custom notations. They are:

[ACT]

I found it convenient to divide the film into 9 “acts” and work on them separately. This cue indicates to my file-cutting and joining program where these segments begin and end.

>

This indicates the audio should be “right aligned”. That is, it matters less about exactly when a voice-over starts, but it's important where it ends. Typically, a significant sound effect, music sting of piece of dialogue follows immediately.

[PRN:]

Pronunciation guide.

[STEP] or [OVER DIALOGUE]

Explicitly notes that the voice-over covers dialogue, and is not an error.

Notes

The map is not the territory. A script is not a movie. The timings are my best estimate. Unless it's a cue marked ">", or it would go over a crucial sound effect, music cue or piece of dialogue, it doesn't matter if the narration doesn't end precisely on my timings.

And always, if something else works better on the day in your edit software, do that.