The Adventure Film Accessibility Project
Words by Tim Burton, Head of Production at Coldhouse Collective.
Realisation is a funny thing — sometimes it creeps up on you slowly, sometimes it slaps you in the face. Last year, when getting into the start of a process about making a film about Deaf climber Morag Skelton as part of the Ascension Series for Berghaus, we had a slap in the face.
Morag talked about the deaf community and how there was basically no adventure media out there that was accessible to them and we realised that not one of the films we’ve made in 10 years of being is accessible to a deaf person. And we’ve made a lot. This was a bit of a WTF moment for us and we felt it was our duty in many ways to try and do something about it.
We were chatting with Matt Heason and the team at ShAFF (Sheffield Adventure Film Festival) and when this came up in conversation he said that I needed to speak to Danielle Sellwood. After a career in sports journalism, Danielle moved into filmmaking. Her daughter, Poppy was born with partial sight and was registered blind in her early twenties. At this point, Danielle realised the same as us — none of the films that she’d made to date were accessible to her own daughter, and she set out on a mission to change this. We hit it off straight away and the snowball was pushed — what could we do to increase the amount of adventure film that’s accessible for the blind/visually impaired and deaf and hearing impaired communities? The Adventure Film Accessibility Project (AFAP) was born…
Over the last decade, an increasing awareness of a lack of diversity represented everywhere has changed what we see in film (including adventure film) dramatically. For example, at ShAFF this year, more than 50% of the films shown were about or made by a woman. This is a monumental shift in just a handful of years. There are now countless great films out there about protagonists who are not straight, white men and this has in turn increased the diversity of people enjoying the outdoors (although the shift is sometimes painfully slow).
It is fair to say that a film about a person in an underrepresented group going climbing (or adventuring in any way) is likely to increase the interest and take up of others in that underrepresented group getting into climbing. Simple.
The thing the AFAP project addresses, however, is that if NONE of the adventure films out there, whether about a straight, white man climbing a mountain or a black, gay woman white water rafting the Zambezi, are accessible to many of the disabled population, whatever their background or orientation, then not only are they unable to experience these films, they are also unable to be inspired or informed by them.
In the UK, 11 million people (over 15% of the total population) are deaf or hard of hearing. The majority will only be able to enjoy a film with the support of captions on the screen. A caption is not a subtitle, it details what is said but also all the non-speech elements of the audio in a film. Turn the sound off on a film you love and it’s a very limited experience — turn the captions on (and not just subtitles) and it goes from almost pointless to hopefully a rich experience. Many platforms have auto generated captions which are a small step but they don’t allow the deaf viewer to experience the film as the maker would have wanted as they only cover badly transcribed speech (i.e. subtitles by a computer!)
Almost 2 million people in the UK are registered blind or partially sighted. They can hear what is said and all the rich sounds that go into a good film, they just don’t fully see what’s happening on the screen or they have an appreciation through colour and movement, but not in any detail. Imagine closing your eyes and “watching” a film, you’d ideally want someone next to you describing what is happening visually on screen, what the people look like, what’s making that noise, what they’re talking about (when people on screen talk about what is in front of them but the blind viewer is unable to see this). This is Audio Description — where a supplementary audio track is played alongside a film (through headsets) to help bring to life what is happening on screen. It turns a film into a rich, descriptive podcast, rather than just music, sounds and people talking.
So, we pledged that, from that point on, we would do everything we can to make every narrative film we produced for public consumption accessible. This meant allocating both time and money to write open captions and writing and recording an audio description tracks and also working with clients to get them on side.
We’d started the film about Morag and had a conversation with Berghaus, the sponsor of the series, about this. They were completely on board and went in full throttle to ensure that the series was going to be accessible — and this included making British Sign Language versions. This is, in some ways, as much about inclusion as access. Many people who are born deaf have BSL as their first language — they often speak/understand English as their second language of course, but anyone who speaks a second language knows how challenging it can be to watch a film in it! A deaf person who’s a BSL user may be able to read the captions on the screen, but they’ll get a much better understanding of the audio in the film through interpretation and generally this also means that they feel more valued and welcome too — which is good for the outdoors (and good for the brand).
Initially, with thanks to Berghaus for some financial support, we worked with Kendal Mountain Festival to set up an Access Film Session — a curated selection of films that we took away, made captions and AD tracks, then brought them back to Kendal to be shown in a cinema with disabled access and an audio loop (the facility where people can tune in or use headsets to hear the audio description). We did the same for ShAFF, with additional support from the BFI, and curated two different film sessions, one of which rolled 30 times over the weekend.
The challenge about all of these sessions was publicising the event within the communities that we’re trying to do this for. It was apparent, after conversations with people in the deaf/blind community, that there’s a high level of distrust about “accessible” events and what that really means. I always think arranging to go to a film session around childcare, work and other commitments is a challenge, but, once sorted, I just get on the bike/bus/in the car and go there, park and walk in. I’d not really fully appreciated the planning and logistics involved for a blind person — travel can be a very stressful thing and often isn’t completed alone. People would have to make a huge effort to come to this and want to be sure that it’s a) good (!) and b) actually accessible. Word spreads fast within the close-net disabled communities and our hope is that, over the coming years, more and more people attend and are inspired by adventure film sessions at festivals until the underrepresented groups are represented in the audience as well as on screen. And then in the outdoors of course!
So — what next. Festivals like Kendal Mountain Festival and ShAFF are now requesting that all films submitted have open captions and ideally have an AD track and point filmmakers to the guide that we created to help them through the process (French version here). This has meant that in two years, the number of films submitted with open captions has gone from 0 in 2021 to more than 10 in 2023 at Kendal Mountain Festival. This is actually a monumental shift.
Then, the filmmakers will start to submit the OC and AD files to other festivals and hopefully the festivals will realise what they’re not doing. Then the brands that sponsor many of the bigger outdoor festival films will also realise that they should be doing more and will start to require that OC and AD are made as standard for every film they commission. It’s a small percentage for many brand sponsored films, but a massive thing for the disabled audience that needs it. .
Then the snowball picks up pace and size and we are moving in the right direction. Easy!
Ha, I’m sure it won’t be easy, but the end vision is there, that all adventure films have OC and AD and all platforms (whether in person or online festivals or platforms) have the facilities to allow a disabled audience to use OC and AD to enjoy the films. We know that this isn’t likely to increase the audience numbers and turnover of the festivals, but that’s not the point. Once everyone understands and accepts that then we’re on the right track.
Last weekend, I was very privileged to be invited over to Banff to present on the public stage and at their filmmaker workshop alongside Danielle and Poppy about accessibility in adventure films — the why and the how. Banff is the biggest mountain film festival out there and they’re already doing more than many festivals in this space about accessibility and we’re very honoured that they’re bringing us out to Canada to try and push the snowball further.
So, let’s think back to the change in diversity representation in adventure films over the last 10 years and then think about where we’d like to be in the accessibility of adventure films in 10 years time. And let’s get there.
