Highlight the lights: Towards strategies for audio describing lighting in film

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. Cinema audio description requires the ability to provide comprehensive answers to many different questions regarding the translation of visual and auditory clues in a usually very limited time frame. The who, when, what and how are only some of the aspects that require audio describing in any given film. This paper focuses on the how of audio description, aiming to investigate the existing audio description strategies through which light and contrast are verbalized. First, the article presents the basic concepts of light and contrast as expressed within Film Studies literature. It then examines the relationship between a number of lighting properties, their effects and their implications for audio description. Next, it analyzes examples of audio descriptions relating to light and contrast encountered in a corpus of commercially audio described Tim Burton films. Kruger's descriptive-narrative continuum (2010) is used to label the relevant strategies, which are then brought together in an overview.