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/
This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog
