No Limits: An Arts Series Focused on Access for All
Meet the students and staff of the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired as they work with organizations across Indianapolis to make art accessible for all.
The No Limits program focuses on removing both physical and social barriers in the arts for individuals with disabilities. Through a grant by Lilly Endowment Inc., the Indiana Blind Children’s Foundation (IBCF) organized high school students from the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (ISBVI) to work alongside several Indianapolis-based arts organizations - the Eiteljorg Museum, Heartland Film, ArtMix, Dance Kaleidoscope, Capital City Chorus, and the Phoenix Theatre - to increase their accessibility for individuals with disabilities. In the process of partnering with these arts organizations, the No Limits students learned important leadership and self-advocacy skills and used their voices to create positive change in their community.
IBCF Executive Director Laura Alvarado knew it would be important to document and tell the story of these projects throughout the three year program, but she wasn’t sure what would happen along the way, much less how to capture and convey what happened through film. Alvarado called on 12 Stars Media because she knew we weren’t afraid to go into the unknown scope together and figure out the details along the way. As soon as we started the project, a sudden realization made us all take a step back - we were about to produce a film about the journey to change art accessibility. We needed to stop and think about the accessibility of our own art - the film itself.
“We should produce these films so that someone could experience the story and be moved, even if they don’t actually see any of it,” Grant Michael, our Associate Producer, said during an early brainstorming session. So, we started listening to Radiolab and other podcasts, intentionally learning from creatives who tell beautiful stories using only audio. That led to brainstorming discussions about how we could capture content differently - improving our work by using audio better in general, from ambient sounds, to music, and especially the recordings of natural conversations and reactions of the people involved.
Over the course of three years, the No Limits students met regularly to discuss their ideas and experiences with art accessibility, visited several organizations throughout Indianapolis, and shared their feedback on how those organizations might improve accessibility. In addition to experiencing the arts themselves, the students also provided the organizations’ sighted staff with a small taste of life with low vision or blindness. At the Eiteljorg Museum, docents were blindfolded and had the chance to experience the exhibits from the students’ perspective, allowing them to identify problems and develop solutions to increase accessibility. Similarly, staff at Heartland Film listened to a film rather than watching it, which opened a broader discussion about audio description.
For the staff, students, and our crew filming by their sides, the moments of uncertainty, vulnerability, and learning were many. We filmed eleven hours and thirty minutes at the Eiteljorg alone. It was a mountain of material, but taking our time and becoming part of the story alongside the characters also provided the most valuable moments, like when a docent takes a student’s hand and runs it along a leathery surface to help him understand the artwork, then weeks later when a student takes a blindfolded docent’s hand and teaches her to use his cane. Those were the reward of surrendering ourselves to a slower, more time-intensive process.
“I took a week just to watch every bit of content we captured, trying to wrap my head around how to bring out the story and amazing personalities of the students in these disarranged clips. A project like this is both incredibly rewarding and terrifying at the same time.”
As we moved into post-production, we had the chance to put into practice some of the very things the No Limits students gave Heartland Film feedback about - namely audio description. Also referred to as a video description or described video, audio description is a form of narration used to provide information surrounding key visual elements in a media work for the benefit of the blind and visually impaired audience. In theaters, museums, television, and movies, audio description is commentary and narration which guides the listener through the presentation with concise, objective descriptions of new scenes, settings, costumes, body language, and "sight gags," all slipped in between portions of dialogue or songs. It requires specially trained writers to create a separate script that is recorded and synchronized with the media. In a movie theater, the audio description is delivered to wireless headsets that patrons wear at their seats. On the web, however, technology has been slower to catch on and accommodate audio description. Sadly, across all types of media, audio description is usually an after-thought and, therefore, wedged in tightly and often ineffectively after a work is completed.
We never questioned whether we’d include audio description in this film. We did have questions about how, though. So, we reached out to Rick Boggs, one of the best in the business, to help us find some answers. Over the phone, we quickly learned that Audio Eyes, the description service organization Rick founded, stays plenty busy. Audio Eyes engineers and producers deliver audio description for television networks including ABC and FOX, as well as government agencies including the U.S. Department of Defense, the Internal Revenue Service, and the National Parks Service. Additionally, they produce audio dramas, audio books, music, radio programs, radio ads, and a variety of business-to-business audio products. Despite the high demand, however, audio description still remained an afterthought for almost all their clients. “Rick, if we considered audio description before we started editing, giving careful thought to where the description could fit into our finished work, it seems like it would be an unusual approach, but would it be helpful?” we asked. “It would be very unusual and very helpful,” he responded.
“The tendency for content creation, especially these days, is to look for the most efficient way to get a message across. But it’s in that seemingly inefficient empty space, sometimes, that the best communication happens.”
Many of us have bought into the idea that our attention spans have gotten shorter (not true, by the way). The culture shaped by supposedly short attention spans, and time-management gurus, and #hustle has us often asking ourselves, “How can we make this video shorter?” or “How can we get this done faster?” Our phone call with Rick and our extensive time with No Limits gave us the boldness to flip those questions around and, instead, ask “How can we leave more room for audio description?” and even, “How can we create space that allows everyone to take their time and experience the same sense of wonder we did throughout this story?”
We reflect on this project as one of the most perspective-expanding we’ve tackled in our seventeen year history. We regained an appreciation for documentary, for meeting and sharing the stories of real characters, and for the importance of silence and slowness. Most importantly, though, we realized that in our attempts to make a more accessible film that would work well for audio description, we ended up making a film that was better for everyone - whether you watch it with the audio description or not. And that realization reaffirmed what we all know, but so easily forget, that we share a lot more in common than we think. We are more the same than we are different.
In their time working with arts organizations throughout Indianapolis, the No Limits students and staff have helped our city take important steps toward art accessibility, and, along the way, they’ve improved our whole community in more ways than we’ll ever know.
If you’d like to learn more about or support one of the organizations in this story, check out their websites below.
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