Disclosed Captioning

Televangelism

2008-07-31T16:42:00.005-04:00

So I haven't written in this blog for over a month, but I encountered something at work to make me dust off the keyboard once more and get to bloggin'.

One of our clients is a health-and-wealth gospel church, and they put out a number of televangelistic programs aimed at helping people get success by means of prayer.

Theological objections aside (too obvious to merit analysis), I find this program fascinating. As a caption editor and occasional transcriber, I'm forced to repeatedly analyze what people say and accurately reflect it in the written word. (This is the goal of captioning, as opposed to subtitling, which is to reflect the meaning of what people say without necessarily being exact.) So this makes me attentive to the rhythms and cadences of particular kinds of speech.

For example, "classic" Hollywood movies from the '30s to the '50s are remarkably easy to transcribe. People speak in complete, grammatically correct sentences with few anomalies (even with westerns, it's only a matter of taking the g off of -ing verbs and including the occasional "y'all). In contemporary Hollywood films, which try to capture realistic/slangy patterns of speech, there's more non-standard English.

But the cadences of this televangelist is a whole nother story. From his accent, he appears not to be a native speaker of English. However, he is quite the orator. He has the unique ability to appear to make sense when, in fact, he's saying nothing meaningful. He'll often switch gears entirely in the middle of sentence, or he'll say something so convoluted that, once you've written it, you're not sure exactly how he managed to sound like he was saying something. Take for instance the following:

"I almost had an experience where I was providing advice to a lawyer, and, uh, and this lawyer was telling me that his problem was advise him and showing what the Bible was speaking about his particular problem."

Now, this gets his point across: a lawyer sought his advice, and the preacher directing him to the Bible. But grammatically, this sentence makes no sense whatsoever. I'm a little bit in awe of this guy.

As a service to the hearing impaired, I've started trying to undermine what the guy has to say by captioning all his stuttering (which is theoretically part of our goal, but a lot of people clean it up to make things more legible) and by ending more sentences with exclamation points. I feel oddly subversive when I do this, even though it's an entirely subjective notion of what makes a speaker credible.

The Wolf Man Meets the Spider

2008-06-26T11:06:00.006-04:00

Two nights ago, I worked on a smattering of projects. I began with the short film Spider (click on short films > Nash Edgerton > Spider to watch), made by Australian stuntman Nash Edgerton, who's done stunt work for the Star Wars prequels, the Matrix movies, and quite a few other big-budget action movies. His short film has been lauded by critics and won a number of awards. I won't reveal anything anything about the plot lest it ruin the movie, but it involves a heavy dose of poetic justice.

I guess my problem with this short film, as with most short films, is: why did it have to be made? They rarely seem to say anything particularly poignant, and the brevity of them (this one clocks in at 9 minutes) doesn't allow you to become invested in the characters. Or perhaps I'm just a boor.

After finishing this captioning job, I went on to work on my second Frankenstein movie: "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man." As it turns out, there are a total of eight Frankenstein movies, all part of the Universal Horror canon. This one stars Lon Chaney as the Wolf Man and Bela Lugosi as Frankenstein's monster. Lon Chaney had previously played the role of Frankenstein's monster in "The Ghost of Frankenstein" and would go on to play Count Dracula in "Son of Dracula." Bela Lugosi had become famous for playing Count Dracula in the original "Dracula" and had also played Ygor in "Son of Frankenstein" and "The Ghost of Frankenstein."

Basically, these two men had played all the same roles in these movies, switching every few movies. To complicate things further, Ygor and the Monster had switched brains in "The Ghost of Frankenstein," so who what supposed to act as what would become a very perplexing question. Ultimately, Ygor's blindness and stupidity being implanted into the Monster created the stereotypical "Frankenstein lurch" with arms raised out.

The plot of "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" follows the Wolf Man's attempt to find death, which would be sweet relief to an otherwise-sane man who goes on killing sprees every full moon. His journey takes him to a glacier, where he unthaws Frankenstein's monster, and the two of them seek out the notes of Dr. Frankenstein's son which describe the secrets of life and death.

Overall, I found the movie enjoyable, though certainly not up to the standards of "Bride of Frankenstein." One of the better parts involves a song-and-dance number at a local festival, in which the cantor sings a sort of carpe diem song about how "life is short but death is long" and blesses Lawrence Talbot (a.k.a. the Wolf Man) with eternal life, to which he violently responds that eternal life is a curse.

Stay tuned! Next post will cover both Patrick Swayze and William Faulkner!

P Diddy and the Sunday Morning Shootout

2008-06-24T00:37:00.006-04:00

Tonight, I signed up for a show called "Sunday Morning Shootout: Sean Combs." The title seemed provocative. Surely this would be thrilling.

No. It was just a film-oriented interview show for AMC, interviewing Sean Combs for his work on the latest production of Lorraine Hansberry's play, "A Raisin in the Sun" (which I'd read for my Modern Drama class a few years back). Pretty basic interview, with a couple of film critics named Peter Bart and Peter Guber. I managed to sneak in one little thing, though. When Sean Combs talked about filling a role that was played by Sidney Poitier in the last production, Peter Guber sort of laughed, agreeing that those are big shoes to fill. I captioned this as (Guber gaffawing).

So, because this was a slow night, and because the details of what Puffy has to say about what makes a good party doesn't interest me, I took frequent breaks, during which I listened to snippets of Jonathan Spence's recent Reith Lectures. If you're at all interested in China, I say check 'em out.

For the second half of the night, I worked on an episode of "Platinum Weddings," which is a somewhat boring, if innocuous, show to caption. Like most of WE's original programming, it's driven largely by a narrator and moves quickly, with people speaking clearly, in heavily edited, easy-to-caption bites. But unlike the infamous "Bridezillas," the bride and groom are actually kind to each other. They're generally good people. They just happen to have a lot of money to spend. It's a far more uplifting show to watch 2-3 times per episode.

Interestingly enough, the bride and groom happened to be Chinese-American, and thus I found my knowledge of Chinese language useful for once. (She wore a qi pao 旗袍, or cheongsam, if you want the Cantonese. I knew how to transcribe the word.) Their whole wedding revolved around California wine country, which actually did look really nice. I found it much more pleasant than just tossing money at everything that comes your way in Beverly Hills.

That's all for this post.

Top 4 Projects

2008-06-21T10:33:00.007-04:00

Last night, there was no work to be done (summer has been slow), so I had the night off. Thus, in lieu of an opinion on something new, I present you with a list of my favorite captioning projects.

1. Bride of Frankenstein (1935) - Amazing old-time horror movie. Many film critics think it's better than the original Frankenstein. First of all, it's a horrendously enjoyable movie on its own right. The final scene in Frankenstein's laboratory is unparalleled in cinema. Low, angled shots and wild hair shooting from the scientists' twisted faces, combined with the dramatic music, the noises of the equipment, and the thunderstorm, all made my blood pump throughout this scene. Also entertaining was the dandyish portrayal of Byron and Shelley at the intro to the movie, not to mention the groans and roars of Boris Karloff as the Monster.

2. Black Caesar (1973) - I never knew I enjoyed blaxploitation till I watched this movie. A remake of the 1931 gangster classic, it portrays the rise of a black gangster who takes over part of the Italian mob. The soundtrack, by James Brown, is one of the best I've ever heard in a movie (it includes my favorite James Brown song, "The Boss"). Also, it was the first movie I captioned in which I was comfortable enough to have some fun. Examples include: (novelty honking) to describe the protagonist squeezing a toy horn and (in sambo voice) when he's mocking the corrupt white cop and flaunting the reversal of power.

3. Odyssey 5 (2002 TV series) Although I only captioned a total of four episodes, I loved the cheesy sci-fi story line: a group of astronauts see the earth blown to bits while they're in orbit, and a mysterious creature who called itself "the Seeker" sends them back 5 years in time so they can prevent the destruction of the earth, which they soon discover has something to do with lines of alien code called "sentients" that inhabit various bodies. It stars Peter Weller, better known as "Robocop." The whole thing is very self-conscious. One great episode, called "Dark at the End of the Tunnel," finds the cynical English scientist Mendel taken in by an apocalyptic cult proclaiming the speedy arrival of the Lord (who turns out to be a sentient). It also features a muscle-bound weatherman who pumps iron and compares the heatwave with his own hotness.

4. Braddock: Missing in Action III (1988) - Chuck Norris film in which he goes back to Vietnam to rescue his Vietnamese wife, who was proclaimed dead during the War, and his Amerasian son. I'd never realized that in the '80s there was such a profusion of "I was in Nam and something snapped so now I'm gonna go on righteous killing sprees in civilian life" movies - the "Missing in Action" series, the "Rambo" series, and "Blue Thunder" are just a few of the more famous ones. This caption file features my first literary reference in a sound description, (a screaming comes across the sky) to describe the descent of a missile on Saigon, as well as a few other gems: (iconic roundhouse kick thwacking), (sentry howling), (children bemoaning fate), and (soldier's final wail echoing).

That's all I have the energy to write about now. More lists to come when I have another day off.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre III: Leatherface

2008-06-19T20:52:00.004-04:00

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:

(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.

Background

2008-06-19T10:10:00.000-04:00

Let's kick this thing off with a bang. I'll lay out some basic information about myself, my job, the format I hope for this to take, and some general goals of the project.

First, I'm a full-time closed caption editor. I graduated from a small liberal arts college in the Midwest with degrees in English and Chinese. I have aspirations beyond this job for graduate studies. I work the night shift, meaning 4:00pm to midnight.

The main activity of my job is to take the script of the program I'm to caption (which is usually supplied by the client or the scripting division of our company), and I import it into a program that divides it up into blocks according to the specifications we give it. I then watch the program through once for the purpose of editing, i.e. making the blocks more coherent, italicizing words spoken off-screen, aligning the blocks of text to left, center, or right, and adding parenthetical sound descriptions. Finally, I watch the program a second time for the purpose of timing it, which making sure all the blocks of text appear at the proper time.

Because I watch so many television programs and movies at least twice through (sometimes more), I develop a number of opinions on what I see. I'd like to share these opinions with you, the reader. Also, I often get a little bored with simple transcription, so there are a number of little experiments I do and games I play. I'd like to let you in on some of these as well.

I hope to update this every day or two, preferably writing the posts at night, after work, while my work-related thoughts are still fresh in my mind.

The main purpose of this blog is to keep my sanity after one of my good friends and co-workers left. I find there aren't too many similarly-minded people at work who enjoy the kind of wordplay we attempt to infuse into our projects. In fact, last night, my supervisor chastised me (very gently) for describing an opera singer's vocal performance as (hitting highest echelon of upper register) and (reaching cusp of audibility).

I hope there are more people out in the world who do enjoy this sort of thing.

Also, if you have any comments or questions, I'll be happy to respond to them. Enjoy.