Polygon: In a Reddit AMA earlier this week, Aaron mentioned that you spent a lot of time talking to and working with members of the deaf community. What was that process like?
Iain Hendry: We both reached out to deaf and HoH [hard of hearing] organizations, which have great online resources that helped us understand the challenges and the way deaf and HoH people approach the world. And then to get a more personal view, I went to deaf and HoH Facebook groups, so I’d chat with people … It helped us to stay connected and understand their experience as best we could.
So many people had a hand in creating this character, from us writing the lines to people doing the animation and every other part of this process, and a lot of them had a friend or acquaintance that they could talk to. And on the more professional side, we had a huge amount of help from ASL interpreters we worked with directly, Lucy Farley and Darcie Kerr, so when we were doing video references in the scenes where Amaya is doing ASL, we could say, “Does this come across as authentic? Are we going in the right direction with the character?”
Polygon: Some of Amaya’s most intimate moments are untranslated — was that a conscious choice?
Devon Giehl: That was very deliberate. We went back and forth on it, but we decided that when Gren wasn’t speaking for her, she spoke for herself. The scene where she’s at her sister’s grave—we were worried, because it’s a show for children, that we might lose people. But then the animation came back, and she was so emotive, and it’s so beautiful. I think even in the absence of subtitles, it really stands on its own. And she’s a deaf character — we wanted it so that understanding what she’s communicating here is for the deaf audience.
Read the full interview at Polygon.com
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