The Invisible Red Thread – The Movie

Whether international adoptee Vivian is at the airport gate in Toronto, exploring a Chinese marketplace for the first time, or touring the orphanage that she was adopted from, the visually impaired will be able to follow the action in The Invisible Red Thread.

Have you ever wondered what that “SAP” button on your remote control is for? On most channels, clicking that button turns on a hidden audio track, known as descriptive video.

Just like closed captioning, descriptive video helps to bring stories on screen to audiences that used to be left out by TV and film. In descriptive video, short recorded narrations fit in between the lines spoken on screen, so that the visually impaired can follow along with action that is key to the story.

Sas Harris

Sas Harris is writing and recording the descriptive video for The Invisible Red Thread, one of the final steps in post-production. When Sas started recording descriptive video in 2002, she was the first in Quebec, and only the second in all of Canada, to offer the service to production companies and broadcasters.

We gave Sas a copy of The Invisible Red Thread, which she will load into a special computer program. The software helps her to work out the timing between the character’s lines, so she knows how long, or how short, her descriptions should be.

Sas has been writing and recording descriptive video for almost ten years, and is used to working with her voice– she was a singer for 30 years before changing tracks.

Over several days, Sas will work her way through The Invisible Red Thread to plan and write the descriptions. Then she’ll use her specially-built sound booth to record the short snippets of narration.

Sas’s work requires her to be an efficient writer. There’s an art to descriptive video, she says, since each description has to be tailored to the spaces between the characters’ dialogue. There may be only a sliver of time to explain a lot of action. Other times, she says, the natural sounds in the film can speak for themselves.

“If there’s a crowd on screen that gasps,” she says, “I don’t need to say, ‘The crowd gasps.’ The visually impaired have very acute hearing. Sometimes it’s better to let the natural sounds tell the parts of the story when they can.”

Kyle records ambient sound

Our doc following international adoptee Vivian back to China had its interviews and sounds recorded in speeding trains, noisy village markets, a busy orphanage and a bustling rural house filled with the sounds of family and sizzle of hot cooking pans. Our sound designers are taking all these noises, voices and music and weaving an immersive world of sound for the film.

“What we see when we watch a film is only half the experience,” says sound editor Andreas Mendritzki, who along with Kyle Stanfield, is bringing together all the sound to form the final soundscape of The Invisible Red Thread.

Andreas and Kyle are from GreenGround Productions, a production company in Montreal. Over the next three weeks, they will be seamlessly combining all the sound that was recorded in the field in China and Toronto with music, voices, narration and sound effects from a library.

“Sound design is about creating everything that you hear when you go to see, or go to hear, a film,” says Andreas.

For a sound designer, a documentary like The Invisible Red Thread poses different challenges than a fiction film.  “Documentary in general needs a lot of cleaning,” he says. “The conditions out in the field aren’t always ideal for recording sound, like they could be in a studio.”

This means combing through the recordings to find the  “pops, hisses, and clicks,” small blemishes in the sound created by the recording equipment, or the rustling of clothing or wind on the microphones. It takes time and patience, but clean sound is essential for allowing the audience to feel a part of the world on screen.

“It’s a lot of detailed work, but audiences are very sensitive,” he says. Distracting sound, even if it’s subtle, can pull the audience away from the story.  “Sound is a huge part of film making, and I think it’s sometimes undervalued,” he says.

“It has a lot to do with how we evolved as human beings- we think very visually, but sound engages us differently.  Emotionally, sound has a different impact.  In a film, visuals tell us about the world outside of us, and tell us what to think.  But sound goes more directly to our inner world. It tells us how to feel.”

Do you have some footage you could share with us?

As we move into rough cut #2, we’re realizing that we need more ‘archival’ footage to help tell the bigger background story of this film: one girl’s journey back to China where she was born. Perhaps you or someone you know recorded some video footage of their adoption adventure to China? If so, we’d love to know about it!

We are seeking video on any format (VHS, HI 8, Video 8, etc.) filmed between 1991 and 2000 in any region of China. Ideally, we’d see a couple and/or the larger group on their trip to the orphanage where they adopted their child, perhaps first receiving the baby, holding and feeding their new child/ children, etc. If you have footage of the orphanage in general (exterior or interior) or general footage of the city and its sites, that would be very helpful, too.  And the last thing we are seeking is billboards or posters in China that promote the idea of Family Planning and the One Child Policy.

 This footage would be used to illustrate two sections of the documentary, each about 1 minute long, where we give some background on China’s “Family Planning Policy” (One Child Policy), the  rise in local informal adoptions and the opening of the country to international adoption.

If you have or know of any video footage or photos like these, please let us know! You can drop us an email at maureen@picturethis.ca or call 514-484-1145 and we’ll let you know how to get it to us. In thanks, we’ll list you in our film’s credits, copy your old video footage to DVD so you can watch it more easily and send you a signed final copy of the documentary “The Invisible Red Thread” when it’s done. 

Please spread the word and thanks very much for helping us complete this film!

Photos of two baby girls in the arms of their adoring new adoptive mothers. The pictures tell the story of two new families created in Jiangxi province in the mid 1990s when they each received a six month old daughter. Vivian, the baby on the left, departed from China soon after this photo was taken to grow up in Toronto, Canada. Shumin on the right, remained in China and is growing up in Ruichang village in Jiangxi province. Their families, their cultures, everything about them couldn’t be more different now. But fifteen years ago, fate started in the same province, in the same life situation.

Vivian and Shumin are among the tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of girls abandoned across China each year since China’s One Child population control policy was enacted in 1979. Two personal stories and two families created by the policy’s unintended side effects. How will the girls‘ lives weave back together? We’re piecing that together in the edit suite right now. But for the moment, we couldn’t help but be struck by how similar the girls‘ first photos are… and how different their fates will likely be.