| Abstract [eng] |
In present times people are seeking inclusiveness for individuals with various conditions, such as visual impairments. With the help of audio description (AD), they are provided with a verbal description of visual information of objects, events, films, etc. Each of the described pieces poses certain challenges for creating AD, including comedy films that are full of visual humour. The aim of the Master’s thesis is to assess whether the humorous effect of visual humour is retained in the AD of the selected films. The object of the thesis is visual humour that is researched in English AD of films "Shrek" (2001), "Shrek 2" (2004), and "Shrek the Third" (2007). To achieve the above indicated aim, the following objectives are set: to introduce the concept of AD and the issues it poses, the term multimodality, the notion of humour and its peculiarities, existing scholarly works on humour in AD, and to assess how the visual humour is audio described and whether the comedic effect in the adapted version is preserved. The research was carried out by qualitative analytical approach and multimodal analysis. The selected topic is relevant to present times because countries encourage for more audiovisual content accessibility for the visually impaired. While some countries, such as the UK, Spain and the US are advanced in the field from practical and scientific perspectives, others, including Lithuania, are lacking but slowly catching up with increasing audiovisual works with AD. The thesis consists of an introduction, theoretical and empirical parts, conclusions, summaries in Lithuanian and English, references, and appendices. The analysis shows that around half of the visual humour cases were conveyed in the AD, around a quarter were partially preserved, and slightly over a quarter were not presented. The reasons behind partial or complete loss are time constraints, fast-paced scenes, text appearing in the background of scenes, inadequate descriptions, prioritization of information, when other details are preferred to visual humour, misidentification of scenes and other. |
