by SynthesizerMan » Sun Apr 19, 2009 10:45 am
For background (from a previous post)
How Invisible Zoo became famous among the hearing impaired.
Here is an odd tale for you, Mike.
When we were considering story board ideas for the video for Nobody's Girl, one of us remembered the practice of having a signer (sign language presenter) in the corner of the screen so that hearing impaired people could understand the broadcast. We decided to run with that and our video featured a deaf woman who was signing the lyrics in the bubble in the corner of the screen.
The video's storyline goes like this: shortly into Nobody's Girl, our girl in the bubble realized that she was the subject of our song, so she gets upset with us. Instead of simply translating our lyrics, She starts to sign in her own defense, to defend her honor so to speak. "You'd better beleive I'm nobody's girl, I don't know who these fools are, I'm just here to translate and they say I'm their girlfriend."
Remember this was the 80's and political correctness was a new thing. In the next scene, we all end up in a mock trial, which she wins. The girl ends up on stage wearing my guitar and leading the band to the finish, while Andy and I ride out the rest of the song tumbling around in the signer's bubble. The vid got some notice and it was different so the band was happy.
The hearing impaired community loved the video, and soon afterwards groups of people started coming to our live shows with big balloons to hang out near the stage speakers. Those were our hearing impaired fans transducing the music through their hands!
I even have a tape somewhere of me doing a talk show for the hearing impaired.
It also led IZ to be nominated for an award from the Gov. of CA for improving the image and employabilty of the physically impaired.
Well, it's all in a day's work!
world of noise