Last night, with not much on the board, three of us split "Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III." Now, I'm not a big fan of what David J. Schow, this movie's writer, has dubbed "splatterpunk" (question: what makes it "punk"? does he somehow claim it to be political?), but I think if slasher/horror movies are done with enough wit and self-awareness, they can be enjoyable. "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2," featuring an entirely different cast and crew, including the legendary Dennis Hopper, pulled it off. So did "Sweeney Todd" and Peter Jackson's comedic classic "Braindead" (a.k.a. "Dead Alive").
The upside of "III" was that it did feature a young Viggo Mortensen as a Texan hunk (named "Tex") who belongs to a family of cannibals. Can't beat a man-eating Aragorn. And the final credits scroll beneath a thrash-metal song whose lyrics go something like: "So come join Leatherface as he licks his addiction. Leatherface. Leatherface. Leatherface. Leatherface. [etc]," which is always fun to caption.
On the professional end of things, captioning a movie like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or any of its sequels presents a problem: how to caption sounds that are nearly always heard for long stretches of time, such as screaming and the sound of the chainsaw. I'm glad we split the movie three ways, because it brought some new blood (heh) into what could otherwise be very something very stale. As for my part, I attempt to change my phrasing every time I have to caption a sound more than once. For example, here is how I captioned the screams of a woman who was bound and gagged:
The other thing I've been doing is captioning certain sound effects without the -ing ending, as is custom. So, rather than (blood splatting), I'll just put (splat), or instead of (shotgun blasting), I'll put (blast). I think it lightens the mood of things, and it's a little more concise.
Finally, I've been trying to infuse a level of creativity into the nightly e-mail summaries I send my boss and supervisors, and so last night, I used extremely violent metaphors to describe what we did. Here's how it began:
"Tonight, with a feeble, helpless docket lying idly at our feet, we took a chainsaw to the board and viciously slaughtered everything on the list in the course of a mere five and a half hours."
And later, I described what one of my co-workers did as, "plowing through the scripting like a maniac behind a pick-up truck, chopping up those roll-up lines as though with an ice pick, and pounding the "+" sign to send in time codes like she was punching a victim unconscious."
I leave you with that, and hope that tonight brings us better fortune.
Don't mess with Texas.
The upside of "III" was that it did feature a young Viggo Mortensen as a Texan hunk (named "Tex") who belongs to a family of cannibals. Can't beat a man-eating Aragorn. And the final credits scroll beneath a thrash-metal song whose lyrics go something like: "So come join Leatherface as he licks his addiction. Leatherface. Leatherface. Leatherface. Leatherface. [etc]," which is always fun to caption.
On the professional end of things, captioning a movie like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or any of its sequels presents a problem: how to caption sounds that are nearly always heard for long stretches of time, such as screaming and the sound of the chainsaw. I'm glad we split the movie three ways, because it brought some new blood (heh) into what could otherwise be very something very stale. As for my part, I attempt to change my phrasing every time I have to caption a sound more than once. For example, here is how I captioned the screams of a woman who was bound and gagged:
(muffled screaming, crying)
(gagged gnashing of teeth)
(muzzled howling)
The other thing I've been doing is captioning certain sound effects without the -ing ending, as is custom. So, rather than (blood splatting), I'll just put (splat), or instead of (shotgun blasting), I'll put (blast). I think it lightens the mood of things, and it's a little more concise.
Finally, I've been trying to infuse a level of creativity into the nightly e-mail summaries I send my boss and supervisors, and so last night, I used extremely violent metaphors to describe what we did. Here's how it began:
"Tonight, with a feeble, helpless docket lying idly at our feet, we took a chainsaw to the board and viciously slaughtered everything on the list in the course of a mere five and a half hours."
And later, I described what one of my co-workers did as, "plowing through the scripting like a maniac behind a pick-up truck, chopping up those roll-up lines as though with an ice pick, and pounding the "+" sign to send in time codes like she was punching a victim unconscious."
I leave you with that, and hope that tonight brings us better fortune.
Don't mess with Texas.
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