Lighthouse Studios on capturing the experience of hearing loss in El Deafo

El Deafo is a BAFTA-winning adaptation of Cece Bell’s New York Times best-selling graphic memoir of the same name, based on the author’s own childhood experiences of growing up with a sudden loss of hearing. The animated mini-series tells the story of a young girl named Cece who is learning to navigate the world after an illness causes her to suddenly lose her hearing. Unable to find her voice, Cece creates an alter-ego called El Deafo to advocate for her in her imagination, and uses these fantasies to build her confidence to make friends and stand up for herself in the real world.

The series tells the story completely from Cece’s perspective and uses clever sound design to share the deaf experience and give an insight into life with hearing loss. El Deafo was produced for Apple TV+ by Lighthouse Studios. The series has won a BAFTA, Prix Jeunesse and Humanitas awards, and is also Emmy-nominated. 

We caught up with director, Gilly Fogg, and editor, Mark Gilleece, to learn about the process that went into animating El Deafo. We discuss the experience of collaborating with Cece Bell, executive producer, and how the team used sound design to convey her story. 

Tell us a bit about Lighthouse Studios. How would you describe the work your studio does?

Gilly: Lighthouse Studios is an animation studio based in Kilkenny, Ireland. The studio was co-founded by Mercury Films in Ottawa, and Cartoon Saloon, also based in Kilkenny, a city with a strong artistic heritage and a perfect location for two animation studios! 

At Lighthouse we provide service work for worldwide broadcasters and also develop our own IP. I’ve been with Lighthouse since it was founded in 2017. We’ve got crew from all over the world working at Lighthouse, and I’m Irish and Canadian myself, so an Irish-Canadian studio was a brilliant fit for me. 

How did Lighthouse Studios get involved with the series El Deafo?

Gilly: My love for El Deafo goes far back, before I even worked at Lighthouse. I was living in Nova Scotia when I first encountered the book. My kids had brought the book home from the library. They were so excited about it, and told me, “Mom, you have to read it.” I did and I fell in love with it. 

When I came to Lighthouse, our first series was Bug Diaries for Amazon Prime Kids, which was then headed by Tara Sorenson. I’d heard that Tara was also a fan of the book, and so we put together a package and pitched an adaptation of El Deafo to her. At the time we heard nothing, but months later, when Tara had become head of kids programming at Apple TV+, she let us know that Apple TV+ was going to make El Deafo and they wanted Lighthouse to produce it, and that’s how it came to us in Kilkenny!

What attracted both of you to working on the adaptation of El Deafo from a book, to an animated series? 

Gilly: Aside from simply loving the book, I wanted to make the series because I felt the story could be brought to life in a new way through sound design, and really place the audience in Cece’s world. The book uses sound bubbles to convey Cece’s experience of hearing loss. There are captions with dialogue, and captions that are completely empty. These empty speech bubbles communicate to the reader that Cece can’t hear what’s being said. The book tells the story through visuals and writing, but it’s all about sound; what you hear, and what you don’t hear. I was very excited by the idea of adding that element. 

With an animated series, we felt that we could use sound design to represent this experience. In El Deafo the series, after Cece becomes ill in the first episode, certain sounds are muffled. Characters are sometimes not fully audible. The audience can follow what’s happening by way of captions, but this use of sound design mimics the uncomfortable sensation of being prevented from understanding what’s going on around you. Just as young Cece did. 

What appealed to the wider team in general was the fact that we’d be working on a real-life story. And that we would get to work directly with the creator, Cece Bell. The whole team felt that making the series was a chance to tell a really important story. We knew that El Deafo could have a real impact on viewers, offering a perspective that’s rarely seen (or heard).

Mark: I got involved during the pitching stage, when we were putting the El Deafo package together. At that stage, I was busy with another series at the studio, and so I hadn’t yet read the books. Once we had the greenlight from Apple TV+, Gilly told me it was time to give it a read, because the project was real. 

I had expected something completely different from the book. Going into it, I knew it was an important representation. And that excited me. But I was completely blown away by how much I fell in love with, not just the story, but the characters. Particularly Cece. 

I was so impressed by how well the character Cece comes across as just another kid. She is completely relatable, but with an experience of deafness that is so perfectly conveyed. The story is so universal and appealing, it made me very excited to work on adapting it into an animated series. 

How much did Cece Bell’s books influence or shape the animated series, and how did your team approach that adaptation? 

Gilly: We stuck extremely closely to the book. The goal was to honor it, not depart from it. It was hugely important that Cece be our guide in making sure that we represented her experience faithfully. As well as that, we wanted to make sure the artwork was as closely aligned to Cece’s book. There were some minor modifications to the characters from the graphic novel which were necessary for animation. But we stayed true to Cece’s original intentions for the characters — all drawn as rabbits — to draw attention to the ears. We wanted to bring the book’s story to life. Whenever we had a question about something, we looked to the book for answers. Anything new that was introduced into the show was created by Cece, or by Cece and us together.

What was your relationship with Cece Bell throughout production, and how involved was she with production decisions? 

Gilly: Cece was involved in basically all decisions throughout production. We had a brilliant relationship with her, and I’m happy to say she’s now a great friend of mine. Collaborating with her was very harmonious. She was curious about animation and the process of adapting a book for screen, and she was open to everything. 

Mark: Agreed. Personally, a very gratifying moment for me was an email Cece sent me. I hadn’t had much one-on-one contact with her, aside from small revision requests. But late in the production process, she sent me a really moving email, thanking me for my work. It was so validating to know that Cece had taken the time to express her appreciation. 

Gilly: Even after the release of El Deafo, Cece and the Lighthouse team have had a great relationship. Last year, we were excited to invite Cece as a VIP guest for the Kilkenny Animated Festival, which we host with Cartoon Saloon. The theme that year was Adaptations and it was wonderful to see Cece in person again, and to speak with her during the talk “Look! My Book’s on TV!”

What kind of representations of hearing loss have been the norm in animation? 

Gilly: We didn’t really have any references for someone deaf in animation. The only representations we’d seen in animated movies or series were deaf characters used for comedy. Those representations aren’t ever from the deaf person’s perspective. Cece’s book is so special because it’s not about a person with hearing loss, it’s by a person with hearing loss. We wanted the adaptation of El Deafo to be storytelling from that same perspective.

One thing Cece told us really early on is that, from her experience, deafness does not equal silence. It’s a lot of fuzzy noise that doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s not like being in a perfectly quiet world, in complete silence. 

We may not have had many animated references while making El Deafo, but while we were making the series, other great projects that represent the deaf experience came out. For example, Sound of Metal was really mind-blowing for us. We felt that the film was approaching representation of deafness in a similar way to us. 

The sound design of El Deafo allows the audience to experience Cece’s world in the same way that she herself experiences it. Can you explain how?

Gilly: The sound is everything in this adaptation and the entire pipeline of the series was sound-led. We built the sound world first, and then storyboarded and animated to that sound. This meant flipping the pipeline to do the soundtrack first. We hadn’t done casting yet, so we did temp recordings of the voices, thanks to the help of friends and crew. 

We then went to a sound designer who sourced an old Phonic Ear, the hearing aid that Cece used as a child. He used these devices to work out what the quality of sound was like when Cece had used them. Cece also sent us loads of useful references of degraded sound. This really helped us to understand how someone deaf may experience the world. 

In the sound design we stripped away the clarity and created various degradations of the sound. Cece taught us that her hearing loss is not about volume. She may be able to hear people talking but everything’s so muffled and indistinct that she can’t understand it. We used sound design to map out how she experiences different people and situations depending on the audio landscape: Are there several people talking all at once? Is the room loud and echoey? When someone turns away, making it impossible to rely on lip-reading, how does that feel? From the perspective of someone with hearing loss, all of these things have a huge impact.

Your team also used captioning to convey Cece’s experience of deafness. Can you explain how?  

Mark:  Captions were an essential part of our production pipeline, and the finished series. Throughout production, we used detailed captioning to keep Cece in the loop. We incorporated captions from the earliest stage of animatics, and basically everything we did in editing had captions. We made sure that they also described in detail the audio, rather than just captioning the dialogue. 

For example, in a scene where the audio was intended to be inaudible, we would caption it “unintelligible.” In scenes where Cece is starting to hear less and less, the captions would convey that — whilst you can still hear that people are talking — what they are saying is not as clear as it was previously.  

I hadn’t ever added captions and subtitles into the production flow before, but all of the platforms we used, including Storyboard Pro, made it simple to incorporate them. I also discovered through this process that there are options for alternate soundtracks. Editors can consider adding an alternate soundtrack for descriptive video, for example. 

The captions created throughout production helped with the process but were never intended to be used for the series. At the end of production, Apple TV+ sent the series to a third-party vendor to write the captions for broadcast. This vendor developed captions based on the script. When Cece saw these captions, she re-wrote them in a way that added more context for the deaf viewer. The resulting captions are really editorializing, they define what the sound actually means. It’s a lot of work to create such detailed captions, but Cece’s captions much better convey the story to a viewer with hearing loss.

Could you describe the animation style of El Deafo, and how you achieved it?

Gilly: We’ve got a really amazing animation team here at Lighthouse. Series we’ve created, like The Cuphead Show and Bug Diaries, have made us very comfortable with stylised, fluid animation. For El Deafo, we went with a naturalistic, subtle style of performance. We didn’t want it to be overly stylised. The goal was to keep the animation low-key and toned down, because we wanted to give space for the sound design to do a lot of the story telling. 

Mark: It was really fascinating seeing the contrast between The Cuphead Show and El Deafo, knowing the animation was made in the same studio. The Cuphead Show is a very loud and dynamic series which has a lot of elaborate animation. Stepping away from that to then work on El Deafo, where the animation style was deliberately understated, really emphasised the contrast between both styles of storytelling.  

What has the reception of El Deafo been like so far?

Gilly: It’s been wonderful! Nominations for awards like the Peabody and an Emmy are really gratifying and winning the BAFTA award for Content for Change was amazing — especially as Cece came over to London for the ceremony, so it was a very special night. The most important thing is that kids are watching it. It can be tough for a 'quiet' show to find an audience. We hope it’s reaching lots of children, and that they’re enjoying it. 

Back in September we showed El Deafo to an audience from the local community for Culture Night, a yearly, nationwide celebration of culture in Ireland. The series is intended to be enjoyed by all ages, but really it’s a series for children. Our audience that night spanned a vast age range, including parties with and without children. It was incredible to receive such glowing feedback from everyone in attendance, and to know that the story had resonated with everyone in the room.  

Mark: I agree, the reception so far has been really great. Something that has stood out to me is that friends of mine have gone out of their way to watch El Deafo. I’ve been in this industry for over a decade, and to be honest, I’ve gotten used to the fact that most of my friends and family don’t watch most of the projects I work on. But El Deafo has been different. I have one friend who subscribed to Apple TV+ just to watch it. He came back to me a week later to tell me how moved he was by the series. 

What is the main message that you hope viewers take away when they watch El Deafo?

Gilly: I think something that makes El Deafo special is that the book, and the animated series, aren’t only about a deaf perspective. At its core, the story is about a kid who’s trying to find her place in the world. In watching El Deafo, all types of people can relate to Cece’s experience of feeling like she doesn’t fit in, whatever the reason. That in turn can lead to a greater understanding of what it must be like to face obstacles you yourself may not have had to face. You can be your own champion.

Mark: From an industry standpoint, I hope that by watching El Deafo, people learn that it isn't hard to include someone with a disability in animation. Everyone has a right to representation, and the reception of this series shows audiences want to see diverse perspectives. Like Gilly mentioned, viewers can still learn universal lessons from the perspectives of people who are different from them — many of these messages are universal. With the technology we have to facilitate production today, there’s absolutely no excuse for not having a variety of perspectives shown in animation.

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• Interested in seeing more of El Deafo? Be sure to watch the series on Apple TV+ and follow Cece Bell on Instagram.
• Are you a superhero in the world of animation production? Be sure to visit Lighthouse Studios' careers page.