Posted in: HBO, TV | Tagged: the batman, The Penguin

The Penguin: Descriptive Audio Team on Delivering Deeper Experiences

Warner Bros Discovery and IDC discuss how they created a more robust descriptive audio experience for DC Studios and HBO's The Penguin.

Descriptive audio has thrived in the age of streaming, but we still have a long way to go as it's still a relatively new medium. Companies are still catching up in terms of allowing visually impaired audiences to experience film and TV media as their more sighted counterparts do today. While some platforms still don't feature descriptive audio, major outlets like Netflix, Max, Peacock, and Paramount+ offer it as an option for their original programming. Variety featured International Digital Centre (IDC), the company who's responsible for providing the descriptive audio for the HBO series The Penguin.

The Penguin on Going Above and Beyond with Descriptive Audio

IDC's Ren Leach describes Colin Farrell's title character, Oz, as, "He looks ahead, his dark eyebrows overshadowing his dark eyes. One of his several gold teeth gleams in the dim light." "You almost get chills, like really envisioning the scene as we're first introduced to this character," says Naomi Waibel, SVP of global product management at Warner Bros. Discovery.

The Penguin, created by Lauren LeFranc, is a spinoff from the 2022 Matt Reeves Warner Bros DC film The Batman, which stars Robert Pattinson as the Caped Crusader. Farrell reprises his role from the film that sees Oz as the high-strung, resourceful driver for Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). With Carmine's death at the hands of The Riddler (Paul Dano), the series picks up as Oz tries to take advantage of the power vacuum in the Falcone crime family, but not before other family members like Carmine's son Alberto (Michael Zegen) and Sofia (Cristin Milioti) come into the picture.

Leach used his experiences as a blind voice artist to deliver "key details from character micro-expressions and visual elements with symbolic narrative meaning" while working with audio description writers Dakota Green and Liz Gutman. "'The Penguin's' audio description project was a first-of-its-kind approach," Waibel said. "This crew that came together really brought a level of expertise that I think helped take this to a whole new level…they describe things in a way that's really cinematic and does right by the storytelling."

"The contextual details they add into scenes give it so much more texture," Leach said. "For example, when we're talking about Penguin's teeth gleaming in the light…the accentuation, the detail that the show is already giving the visual audience is picked up by our writers and added in such a way." For more including how Leach breaks down Sofia's progression and that contrasts with Oz's, you can check out the whole interview. The Penguin, which also stars Rhenzy Feliz, Deirdre O'Connell, and Clancy Brown airs on Sundays on HBO and streams on Max.

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