How to Deal With Jargon in "The Barrier"

One of the problems some viewers had with "The Barrier" was the amount of transportation planning jargon I used. I think I've come up with a way to deal with that. I also moved forward with my recreation of the script and creation of new subtitles.

How to Deal With Jargon in "The Barrier"

Some people commented that they didn't understand the jargon I used in the story. I don't want to completely replace the jargon because that would create long complicated descriptions all the time. I also want to avoid injecting "As you know Bob ..." dialogue to explain what the terms mean.

The approach I will try is to have the character Vincent Campbell play dumb. I don't want the character to be dumb. He just plays dumb as a tactic to manipulate people. He would deliberately misunderstand jargon, and force other characters to explain what they mean. There is already an example of this in the movie where Dennis needs to explain what a travel survey is. If I can make Campbell's misinterpretations humorous, that should keep the explanations from sounding too dry.

For example, when Arthur says he is concerned about the trip generation, Campbell's response would be, "Why would anyone care about drugged out old hippies?"

Recreated Script

I have all of the dialogue matched against the captions now. There were quite a few discrepancies I had to fix. Many of them were changes I made to improve pronunciation. There were only a couple of places where I had new dialogue to include.

I still need to add in some more action descriptions. I already did this for the first few scenes. I don't want to over do the action descriptions, because I don't need them for what I plan to do. I think they will help the voice actors understand the situation better.

The script is still in an Excel spreadsheet. For the rewrite this might be OK, but I think I need to convert it to a script format. I'm not so sure how to do that easily.

When I matched the dialogue, I noted some of the places where I want to make changes for the next version of the movie.

Revised Subtitles

When I made some changes to the movie back in 2014, I added some time at the start and so the old subtitles were out of sync. While I worked on the script recreation, I had to bring the old subtitles into the spreadsheet I used. This allowed me to adjust the times when the subtitles are displayed.

I had to work out what the adjustment should be. That took a couple of tries to get right. Although, there is a few places where I still think they might be off. Not by more than a half second though.

You can check out the new subtitles here: http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/filmlist/the-barrier/

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