Thinking outside the box: 03 (London)

 

I was approached by a subtitling company one day to translate into Chinese the narration of an in-house video series made by an international company for their employees.

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Thinking ahead, I said, “I can do the translation and deliver it as hard copy, but how are you going to get it electronically onto the video screen as subtitles, to flash on and off at the right places?”  The subtitling company had the software for digitally generating the European language subtitles, but this was 1989 in the West.

“You have a point there,” they said.

That was when my mother’s experience of being called out of the cinema in the middle of a film came to mind.  (See Thinking outside the box: 02)

I suggested that the subtitling company do a dry run first with a few subtitles — link up three machines:

Machine 1 plays the video.

Machine 2 is a camera trained on my print-outs (placed on the table by hand, sheet by sheet from shot to shot), with the printed line of Chinese text positioned at the right height from the bottom of the screen, where subtitles normally sit.  

The images from Machines 1 and 2 are fed into Machine 3, which records the final version (the video with the subtitles overlapping the picture).

On my part, I had my own dry run to do for their dry run:  produce each subtitle in terms of different font sizes (to see how it’d show up on the screen — too big, too small or just right), and in terms of positioning at the bottom of the A4 sheet of paper (too high, too low or just right).  All these different versions were then handed over to the subtitling company to try out for the digital recording.

My idea worked!

Ironical that, for Chinese, we should’ve had to resort to a 1960s crude improvisation for a video series that had its European language subtitles produced and recorded digitally.

(London, 1989)