Ep. 34: Up Close with Rhys Lloyd on Olympics and SNL Live AD

Alex and Lee sit down with Rhys Lloyd, the Studio Head of Descriptive Video Works to discuss everything that goes into creating live audio description for the 2024 Summer Olympics, Paralympics, and Saturday Night Live, which has AD for the full season for the very first time!

Contact Rhys Lloyd: rhys@dvworks.com
Contact Descriptive Video Works: info@dvworks.com
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Transcript

Lee Pugsley
What's up, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Dark Room, where two blind cinephiles illuminate the sighted. I'm Lee Pugsley.

Alex Howard
I'm Alex Howard.

Lee Pugsley
And this is a podcast hosted by two legally blind guys for film lovers of all abilities. And today, we have a very fun topic with an awesome special guest. Alex, why don't you introduce our guest for this episode?

Alex Howard
So I know a lot of our blind listeners-- Well, a lot of our listeners, period, watch the Olympics. And for those of you who don't know, they were audio-described. So today, we have Studio Head of Descriptive Video Works, Rhys Lloyd, to talk about how all of that came to be with the live description at the Olympics. Welcome, Rhys.

Rhys Lloyd
Thanks, Alex.

Alex Howard
Lee and I are really wondering, we thought it'd be interesting to talk to you just because I'm sure there's so many behind the scenes planning that must go into the Olympics, and then a lot of things that you have to do in the moment because you don't know what's going to happen at the Olympics, obviously. And so we were just wondering how all of that happened, what planning went into it, and then how you change things on a dime when things happen that you don't expect.

Rhys Lloyd
Sure. Well, going back a few years, we've actually been doing live description for the Olympics since the London 2010 Olympics, but that was for CBC in Canada. Then we progressed that, and then we started working with NBC. I think it was the Rio Olympics was our first year with NBC. And at the time, it was the opening and closing ceremonies. And then it continued. Each Olympics, it would be a little bit more. For both Beijing and Tokyo, for the Olympics, we were doing primetime coverage, like primetime late night, as well as the opening and closing ceremonies. And then for the Paralympics, we were doing the full programming day for NBC. Come this time, NBC were really excited about what we had previously, and they wanted to expand it. So this year... So previously, we'd done... During the Olympics, we'd done maybe six, seven-hour broadcast day in those sort of primetime hours. This year, they came to us with a proposal to do two concurrent programming, so the Peacock stuff that was on streaming as well as the broadcast stuff. And it totaled between 26 and 30 hours a day. It was like--

Alex Howard
Wow!

Rhys Lloyd
Certainly a significant expansion on what we'd previously done. Up until this year, we had had the same... We'd had two describers for the last few Olympics working together, but obviously, two people can't handle a 30-hour broadcast day, and so we had to look at expanding our team. For the Paralympics, we'd already expanded. We took one of our describers who had done the previous two Paralympics, and we brought them into the Olympic team. And then-- But we had to add, because of the significant expansion of the programming, we went to a team of six. From a team of two to a team of six doing it. Previously, there had been one producer on the NBC side working with our team. This year, there were three. For the Paralympics, it's a slightly smaller programming day than that 30 hours, but it was still a team of four who were doing the Paralympics this year. So even that saw an expansion over what we'd done in prior years. So from that standpoint, it introduced a lot of interesting challenges. The pool of people who've done live sports audio description is pretty small.  So there was a lot of training aspects involved. Then there was just a climatization to the unpredictable of the Olympics. That was, I would say, highlighted by the introduction on the NBC side of Gold Zone. I'm not sure how many people caught this, but this was on the Peacock coverage. Gold Zone is sort of like the NFL Red Zone coverage, but for the Olympics. So it's multi-screen, and at first, it was two events simultaneously. Then it was four. Then I think they went to eight at the one time, and I think they ended up with 10 at some point, which obviously, from an audio description standpoint, is tricky. Right? How do you handle 10 concurrent disparate events happening simultaneously? We didn't really even know. Honestly, the first day of the Olympics, I tuned into it to watch, and I'm like, "We got two events happening at the same time. Did anybody know that we were going to be doing this?" I'm texting the describer going like, "What, uh, I think we should do this." We were just making it up on the fly, how to handle that piece. But I will say, we can get into the skill set of the describers because it's a tremendously unique skill. But I will say that our team that handled this were exceptional. Not only did they do a great job of the description themselves, but they also were so adaptable. And frankly, they were working five, six straight hours on TV, and their stamina was amazing. Both their physical and also cognitive stamina to stay present and to stay with the ability to translate the visuals into words. It was an immense task.

Lee Pugsley
Yeah, your team did a tremendous job. And especially, I'm glad you mentioned the Gold Zone coverage, because when I was watching that, I was like, "Wow, that has to be so insane to describe all of those things, because all of that stuff is happening simultaneously." And it really is such such a workout to be describing those live events all day long. So I guess when you first started assembling your team, I'm sure, like you said, there's people that you work with before, but also you brought on some new describers. How do you prepare people for something like that? Because you obviously have an idea of what the events are and some of the certain terminologies around those sporting events, but you don't necessarily know who's going to win. You don't know how the events are going to go. There's so much unpredictable that I'm just so curious to know, how do you prepare your team to handle those unpredictable moments?

Rhys Lloyd
Sure. It'll be easier if I use names for our describers, and they deserve to be named. They were exceptional. Our describer team for the Olympics was Norma Wick, Tony Ambrogio, Darren Polish, Jeff Heck, Ethan Ransom, and Brandon Ross. Tony and Norma had worked with us on the Olympics for the past few years, and both of them have a long history working in Canadian sports broadcasting, on the equivalent to ESPN in Canada. They have deep roots in sports, but Norma also works as an audio description writer in addition to her sports work. She's operating in both pools. Tony has, over the years, trained as a live audio describer for sports in addition to his standard sports broadcasting work. In a way, they're at the pinnacle and the nexus of both deep sports knowledge, tremendous broadcasting experience, but also coming at it from an accessibility and audio description experience background. Darren is a live describer who has done a lot of live description. He's done the WWE SmackDown! for years. He's also an audio description narrator. Great voice. Darren had worked with us on a previous live description job. He'd done an amazing job. Darren and I had chatted. His sports knowledge was significant. His interest in research was high. So we were like, this is a good additional member of the team. Jeff Heck is one of our staff writers at DVW. He'd worked on the Paralympics, the previous two Paralympics broadcasts, and so has trained as a live describer, as well as having, obviously, a significant depth of experience as an audio description writer. And then Ethan has been writing for us as well and had just completed our live description training. Again, he came at it from more of the audio description background, but he also has a depth of sports knowledge that he brings to the table. And then Brandon was a new hire. Brandon comes from more of the sports broadcasting background, and we gave him some training on audio description. So we were bringing together this team that was like a hybrid of people who came predominantly from an AD background and people who came predominantly from a sports background. Their strengths, I think, really complemented each other really well. Now, they worked, for the most part, independently of each other because there was so much of the broadcast day. They were never on the air together, except the opening and closing ceremonies, which Norma and Tony did together. But they're still a team, and there's shift changes, and there's handovers of like, "This is what we were doing," and all of that piece. Ethan and Jeff, obviously, they had, from a complexity standpoint, a different experience with the Gold Zone coverage. But they both are so... They're such sharp brains, and they're also such calm individuals that they were able to handle the unpredictable flow of Gold Zone because that's a show that really has no scripted path. There's multiple events going on, and the production team, who we were lucky enough that we were on the same floor as the the NBC broadcast teams as well. But their production team is weaving that narrative as they go. They're like, "Oh, this interesting thing is happening over here in road cycling. We're going to go there, and we're going to stay there five minutes. Now we're going to go, and we're going to go back to a multi-screen of four events. Actually, what's happening over here in canoeing? Let's go there." And so that is really just a... I always think of it as this surfing analogy of like, you just try to stay on the wave and you try not to fall off. But it is also like... It was a remarkable feat. Everybody who worked on the Olympics, AD, were wiped by the end of it. They were elated because it was a really great experience for them. But I think emotionally, physically, and intellectually, it took a lot out of them. So they all took a little bit of time off at the end. But anyway, all of which to say that the team was made up of different pieces. But to answer your question in terms of preparation, the Olympics is obviously different from some other areas of live description because it is completely unscripted outside of, obviously, some of the studio introduction pieces. But there is also so much research available to you about the venues, about the... You know, you get into the visuals of the opening ceremony with the flags. The opening ceremony of this Olympics was unique, and that was its own research challenge. But if you're talking about the actual sports, there are niche sports that are not super familiar to most viewers. And so you've got these unique description challenges. How do you convey a sense of time in a swimming race? How do you bring that to the viewer through audio description when a sighted viewer is seeing the splash of the arms coming through the water? How do you convey that in a different way through AD? There's a huge amount of research that goes in, in advance, but also each day, as they look at the rundown of what sports are on that day. Gold Zone was a little more fluid. I mean, everything is pretty fluid, but the other rest of the programming had a bit of a structure of like, "We're going to do an hour and a half of beach volleyball," or whatever it was. Or "We're going to watch the US team compete in women's floor gymnastics" or whatever it might be. They had a little bit more structure. But even then, if the narrative of Olympics was taking it in another direction, they had to be able to flip on a dime. So a ton of pre-research and then obviously, reinforcement on the day. Plus, they're working with producers who work as technical conduits, research assistants. Like, "Oh, we're doing diving. Can you give me the dimensions of the diving board?" For instance, or "What is the capacity of this stadium that they're in?" So there's a lot of different variables that work into that. So it's a large team effort. And then obviously, there's the audio engineers that NBC have that are all doing their job incredibly well. It's a really significant effort from a live description standpoint. Because live AD can also be very stripped down in a different environment. But this is obviously a unique one.

Alex Howard
I noticed, I think it was just during the opening ceremony and some of the closing ceremony, I guess, too, there were some pre-recorded stuff. Did you guys get to record the AD with that, or did you have to do that live as well?

Rhys Lloyd
No, everything's done live. All the AD is performed live. That's true for any live AD job we do. We don't ever record and play it back. But with the opening ceremonies, they were very tight with information. There was very little that we could prep for beyond a handful of things that were made available to all broadcasters to help them prep for the day. But no, it's almost all extemporaneous. For a traditional live AD job, like an award show, for instance, we will probably see the nominee packages beforehand or the in-memoriam segment. Or if you're doing... We've done the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, for instance, and floats follow a certain order. They have to because they're lined up in New York City in a certain order. There is this... We know the progression of events and stuff like that that's happening live in a different way.

Alex Howard
Were you able to see how many viewers... I mean, obviously not during it, but after the fact, I know for me, like I don't have access to the SAP channel or I don't know how to access it. But since this was on Peacock, I knew how to access the AD through Peacock. I was actually telling my blind support group how to do it because there were several people in there who didn't even know it was being described. Were you able to actively see how many people were using the AD for the Olympics or no?

Rhys Lloyd
We have no visibility to that. There's certainly an increased traffic of commentary and whether it be on social media channels. I'm lucky enough that a reasonable size portion of my job involves speaking to AD consumers. And so a lot of them have my direct email, and they'll just email me up going like, "This was great," or, "I'd love it if you could add in a bit more here or there." But no, we don't have viewership numbers. To be honest with you, on a traditional broadcast model, I don't know that any network has access to that because cable works differently and it's probably not aggregated. Through streaming services, I presume they have levels of data that they have, but they don't necessarily willingly share that information.

Lee Pugsley
Yeah, that totally makes sense. It's interesting because I know that you guys have been describing the Olympics for years, but for whatever reason, this year was the first year that I knew that they were being audio-described, and it seemed like there was more attention brought to the fact that the Olympics were being audio-described this year versus the other years that you guys have been doing this. So why do you think that there was more attention brought to the audio description component of the Olympics this year?

Rhys Lloyd
I think for the Olympics, specifically, I think it stems from a couple of things. I think doing the full broadcast day means that no matter who you are as a consumer, they're pretty much... I mean, there were hours between 1:00 and 6:00 AM that we weren't on the air, but you could pretty much tune in whenever suited you, and there was audio description available. I think that is that convenience factor of not having to catch the few hours at night. The other thing that played well for that, I think, is the time zone of the Olympics. It being Paris versus it being in Beijing or Tokyo meant that the events were happening live in the morning, which was a convenient time for a lot of people in North America to watch. Whereas prior to Olympics, the live events, if you wanted to capture the shared things live, that was happening at like, midnight Eastern. That's roughly when the main gold medal events were happening. And so that becomes a little bit trickier. The other thing is honestly, like, you know, NBC did a great job of rolling up communication about it. I always tell clients this, that it's one thing to commission live audio description, and it's another thing to make sure people know about it, because the audience doesn't always assume that something that's happening live, in particular, sports programming, will be accessible. But if you're going to do it, take the extra time to share communication about it so that people will tune in. So I think the engagement level was higher. And then I think the community picked up on it and shared it with other people. As you were saying, Alex, you were sharing with different people how to access content for the Olympics with other people in your network. The other part was, I think, the Peacock piece of it, you could still watch recap content with audio description. There was lots of... Even if you missed it live, if you were really excited about the gold medal women's basketball game, you could find it on Peacock after the fact with audio description. And so I think that part, I think, helped a lot. And that was also true of the NBC Olympics, the dot com website, too. There was a lot of availability there, too. So I think most of the credit to why more people were paying attention to it this year goes to NBC. They decided to do more of it, which allowed more people to watch, and then they decided to do a really great job of telling people about it.

Lee Pugsley
I agree with all of the points you made that all of those things were helpful. And then another thing I just wanted to add really quickly is that with the Peacock platform itself this year, the organization and the way to access events and define them was so much easier and so much more put together than the 2020 Olympics on Peacock. I remember in 2020, going on the Peacock platform, and it was honestly just a mess for the Olympics section. There was no organization, there was no order to anything. But this year, they did such a good job of organizing the platform as to, "Here are the past events, here are the live events. You can search for an event." And it was just so well put together. So I do applaud Peacock for making a great Olympics platform this year on their streaming service.

Rhys Lloyd
Yeah. I didn't have access to Peacock on the last go around, so I can't speak to that. But I definitely found that it was done as well as it could be done. And there's a real commitment to to making the audience experience streamlined and positive, and to not just provide accessible content, but to provide an accessible experience in accessing that content. I know that they're really committed to that.

Alex Howard
I know personally, when I first tuned in to the Olympics, I tuned in to the opening ceremony because I was like, "Oh, my God, this is audio described. I want to see what this is like." And it was great. But I noticed as they went on, you could tell that they were more confident, I think, because just jumping into a live anything, I think, is like, you don't notice the nerves until later. You know what I mean? And so by the time we got to diving, the last week of the Olympics, they were on it. And it was like they were describing the splash and the diving and same with the gymnastics. And I was like, "This is so cool." It was cool in the beginning, too, but then by the end, I was like, "Oh, my God, they're really getting the hang in the flow of this."

Rhys Lloyd
I think that's true. The opening ceremonies were tricky this year because of this very specific nature of where the event took place or where the ceremonies took place. They didn't do a full "let's float everybody down the Senne" run through. There was no way to watch it in advance. And so some parts of a ceremony like that, this is just me speaking personally, some parts of an event like that are, like, drag a bit, and some parts of that are really compelling and exciting. From an audio description standpoint, there's only so much you can say while you're watching something happening very slowly that is pretty static. It's like, yes, this... We ran into something like this. We did live description for the coronation of King Charles. It's like, once you've described the carriage and the streets of London that it's going through, it's just more description of the carriage and the streets of London that it's going through. That was-- That one was like a 30-minute processional of this carriage going very slowly. It's like this particular… The describers did an amazing job because this particular ornate thing that's on there is called this, et cetera. And the ceremonies are a bit like that, too. It's like, "Now we're going to watch people dancing with fire, and I'm going to describe it to you. And, oh, we cut back to the people with fire. They're still doing the dancing." But again, it's about weaving that piece. With the events, I think, look, there's only so much you can do to prepare yourself for the mental gymnastics of actually doing it. You can research until you're blue in the face. You can do all of the prep. And then when you're there and you're like, "Oh, she's running at the pommel horse. What's the thing called where they do the double round up?" And again, I think that muscle memory settles in. I remember talking to the describers who were new to our team beforehand. I'm like, "Where you are on the first Saturday is not where you'll be by the first Wednesday or where you'll be by the following Monday. Don't bury yourself in recrimination. If you make a mistake, you got to keep going because you're on the air for a number of hours, and the audience deserves, obviously, the very best. But the audience also understands it's live."

Alex Howard
Oh yeah.

Rhys Lloyd
"And so if you need to correct yourself, correct yourself. It's okay. Mistakes happen in live TV, and it's completely unscripted. And the only thing you don't want to do is double down on your mistakes or get so distracted by your mistakes that you make more of them." I think that you're absolutely right. I think with some of our describers who've done this before, who've done the Olympics before, they can hit the ground relatively quickly. This isn't new to them. But for anybody for whom it's new, there's a learning curve that goes from I've done a two and a half hour awards show live description job to I'm doing six hours of 10 different sports that nobody really knows. The Olympics is filled with these incredible sports that we don't watch for four years. I don't know that there's a huge fencing viewing community except those two weeks of the Olympics. And there was a lot of fencing on TV. I loved watching some of the... I've never watched competitive rock climbing, but I watched it in the Olympics. It was great.

Alex Howard
Oh, yeah. And in no way was that that disparaging the narrators. I mean, you go back and listen to this podcast.

Rhys Lloyd
No, I didn't think so.

Alex Howard
Yeah.

Rhys Lloyd
Yeah, no, I didn't think so at all.

Alex Howard
So were they trying to not talk over the announcers? Or were they... I know that time because you don't know when they're going to talk, but then it must be really tough, right?

Rhys Lloyd
There's two things that we try really hard not to do. One, talk over the announcers, and two, say the same thing as the announcers. The talking over the announcers, look, you can try really hard to avoid it, but it's unscripted. You don't know when they're going to speak. There are certain patterns you can follow, like during tennis, the sports announcers don't talk during the point. So that's great. Audio description, fill in those. There's sports, like gymnastics, where they don't do a lot of speaking while it's going on, or in the Winter Olympics, in figure skating. That's not true in running races, etc. So there's a lot of adjustments to the different sports and how they approach that. The other part is not repeating information that the main announcers do. Well, this is like, it could almost turn into a really devastating drinking game. How many times do we provide information because the announcers haven't said it yet. And then literally within 30 seconds, they say the same thing we just said. Well, of course, there's no way we knew that they were going to say that. But I know that that is for our describers, that's the gut punch for them each time. They're like, "Okay, are they going to say it? They're not going to say it, so I'll say it here. I'll add this bit of description." And literally 15 seconds later, they hear the main broadcasters say the same thing, and they're like, "Ugh! Not only did we duplicate information, but I used a gap in the audio, which I could have used to say something they were not going to say to say something that they ended up saying." But like, there's no-- it is super unpredictable. Obviously, in a more scripted live environment, we would never duplicate something that somebody is going to say. But in sports, that's just going to happen.

Alex Howard
And they were obviously in Paris, right?

Rhys Lloyd
No, they were not in Paris. They were in Stamford, Connecticut. They were working for the NBC Sports Broadcasting Center in Connecticut.

Alex Howard
Oh, wow. Okay. So then my follow-up question. Descriptive Video Works is doing SNL this year for the '50s season, which is awesome. Are they in 30 Rock with them?

Rhys Lloyd
Yes, indeed.

Alex Howard
How does that work with you guys being in 30 Rock with SNL? How exciting is that?

Rhys Lloyd
I mean, it's really cool. I'm coming up on my fifth anniversary working at Descriptive Video Works. When I found out that we did live description, like when I first started, and I was like, "What is it that we do here at this company?" I found that live description was one of those things. I wrote down in my planning notebook, "Must Get Live AD on Saturday Night Live," because I've been a fan forever. I mean, full disclosure, I was a toddler when it débuted, so I didn't watch it back in 1975. But I've been a fan since the '80s, let's put it that way. It's such an iconic show, but also so famous for visual gags. And here there's a service that could elevate those visual gags and make them more accessible, make the show more accessible. It took a lot of work and a lot of persistence and pestering and just reminding people that this could happen. There were some incredible advocates for it internally within NBC. And end of Season 49, we did some test episodes. Actually, the season finale of Season 49 was actually done live to air. And they take a good portion of the summer off because it's a pretty intense season for all of them to work on. But we had conversations with them a month or so ago, and they decided to bring us back for Season 50, for the full season. When they decided to bring it back for Season 50, we had discussions about whether we would do it remotely because we do a fair bit of live audio description remotely for NBC. We're doing Live AD for WW Smackdown!, and that's all done remotely. We don't travel around the country with them. But they made the decision they were really happy for us to do it on-site. And so our describer each week will be doing it live from 30 Rock, which is very cool. They get access to some of the materials, but that show is being worked on right up until air time. It is a scripted show, but it also is very fluid, and it's certainly a fun description challenge because it's different from anything else on TV, really. And so even some of the standard AD conventions, character naming, get tweaked for something like SNL. Like, is it important to tell you the character name of the person that the guest host is playing, or is it important to tell you that it's that person?

Alex Howard
Lee and I say it's always important to say the cameo. So do you say Dana Carvey playing Joe Biden?

Rhys Lloyd
Yeah.

Alex Howard
That's awesome.

Rhys Lloyd
No. And you know, we had a lot of discussions very specific to Saturday Night Live as it differs from other shows, even other live shows, because the cast itself, they're well known. Some of the gags are funny. If you think back to my classic era of SNL, it's Chris Farley and Patrick Swayze as the Chippendales dancers. That visual is the joke. Identifying the character names of those two dancers is not particularly helpful in elevating the humor, but reminding viewers that it's Chris Farley who's doing the Chippendales Dance, and then Patrick Swayze doing it, that's where the gag comes in. We don't follow the strict conventions of AD in that manner. Obviously, we're not doing interpretive description, but we are from a cast naming-- and we're not force naming. These sketches are three minutes long. We're not going to wait for the first time somebody mentions Joe Biden's name to say that it's Dana Carvey coming out as Joe Biden, right?

Alex Howard
Oh, definitely. Yeah, the Joe Biden thing killed me. He's so good at it. I didn't know who it was at first because I don't have access to SAP, like I said. I think that's the way you can see it right now. So then my friend the other day mentioned it was Dana Carvey, and I was like, "What?!"

Rhys Lloyd
It's a unique and really fun show to do. We're really glad they gave us a chance to do it. It certainly works your current events muscles as well, because obviously a lot of the show, whether it be weekend update or usually the cold open, is very topical. It's going to be fun. We're really excited to be able to be part of this historic season of it.

Alex Howard
Who's the narrators for it?

Rhys Lloyd
Right now, the first two episodes were live described by Joe Amodio, and Allyson Johnson is going to be doing this coming week. And Joe and Allyson will be doing the season together, and we may look to expand beyond that. But for now, that's the plan. But it's an interesting year, both from a celebration standpoint for Saturday Night Live, but also fairly newsy going on. I'm sure it's going to be a particularly interesting time to be doing that show. But the other thing that's super exciting for me as I look at something like Saturday Night Live, and we also do live description for The Voice and for America's Got Talent, is we're starting to see a normalization of live description on weekly television shows. So it's not just a big event like the Olympics or some holiday specials. It's also this standard television programming that is operating on a weekly basis. Or the work that's done on WWE SmackDown!. We're starting to see Live AD become something the viewers can count on being there. And that's very exciting because I think once you get into that normalization cycle of expectation setting, then you can also turn the corner from, "I'm just grateful it's there" to "I want to hold it to a really high standard." That's what we're really excited about, is the conversations not just being about, "Whoa, there's live AD for this?" But qualitative conversations about the live description. Because that's when the whole, when all of it can be elevated. I think that's happening with the proliferation of prerecorded AD on streaming services. We've now got conversations about qualitative levels of AD. It's not just about "Oh, my gosh, there's actual accessibility here." It's like, "Is the accessibility good or bad?" And I think Live is going to go through a similar piece, and I'm super keen to see that happen.

Alex Howard
That's exactly why we started this podcast, because we don't just want to be thankful it's there. We want to be critical, but also it should be there for everything.

Rhys Lloyd
Yeah, agreed. I ascribe to the Describe Everything motto, and I think [chuckles] -- not our company. We're not going to tackle every piece of visual media. But I believe that we should be working to remove impediments from the ubiquity of description, and Live AD is a portion of that. I'm really gratified that our clients are looking beyond the current horizon and looking at what we can do more.

Lee Pugsley
Yeah, it's really exciting to see where the trajectory of Live AD is going. And me and Alex are so grateful to you and your team for being a part of that and really helping to advance the normalization of live audio description on weekly shows going forward. So thank you so much for that. And thank you so much for being here today. This has been a really great conversation.

Rhys Lloyd
Oh, well, thank you, Lee. For real, I'm deeply appreciative that I have the opportunity to work in this field and that I get a chance to speak to consumers about what they want to see described or how they want to see things described. It's literally the best part of my job, and this is the best job I've ever had. So I'm deeply grateful. And thank you also for having me on the show.

Alex Howard
Yeah. Thank you so much, Rhys. And we like hot ones here. This camera, this camera, this camera. What do you want to plug for Descriptive Video Works besides us now that you guys are working on?

Rhys Lloyd
Stay tuned for some forthcoming interesting information, I think, about some other live description pieces coming up. But look, I think I'll continue to do my best to also help viewers find it. I talk to the ADP regularly when live description jobs that are unexpected, I try to make sure they know about it. I try to post on the Facebook group about live description as well. From that standpoint, and then beyond that, we love what we do. We love the opportunity we have to work in this field. We strive to continue to get better and better. And so do not hesitate. If there are consumers out there, viewers out there who have feedback for us, do not hesitate to reach out to DVW and let us know what you think. Good, bad, praise...

Alex Howard
Where should they reach out to?

Rhys Lloyd
Well, my email is rhys@dvworks.com, or there's also info@dvworks.com, or on our social media channels if that's easier for people.

Alex Howard
Okay, great.

Lee Pugsley
Awesome. And we do encourage listeners to reach out if you do have any feedback for Rhys, because it will only help to advance enhance the audio description quality and community for all of us. And then if you have any questions for me or Alex about anything you've heard today or things you might want to have a deeper dive on, feel free to reach out to us at DarkRoomFilmCast@gmail.com. Once again, that's DarkRoomFilmCast@gmail.com. And you can also follow us on Instagram and YouTube @DarkRoomFilmCast.

Alex Howard
We'd like to thank Matt Lauterbach and All Senses Go for helping out with captions on this episode.

Lee Pugsley
Well, thank you guys so much for listening. And Rhys, once again, thank you for being here. And we will see you guys next time on The Dark Room.

Alex Howard
All right. See you guys. Take care.