Subtitling a movie is pretty close, if not identical to, jabbing an ice pick repeatedly into your ocular cavity whilst listening to showtunes and eating your least favourite food. I say this without preamble because the last three days of my life has been devoted to the fine art of Dantean punishment. And as a brief scholar into the realm of Hades during the eighth grade, when I first read the Inferno, my expertise on intellectual pain is fairly well-studied and can be backed by numerous and deadly arrows of logic and reason. Virgil rocks, you know. But that leads me back to subtitles. Which I believe would have had their own circle reserved entirely for failed filmmakers and artists.
We met with our film composer on Sunday afternoon. Note, I said “our film composer.” Yes. He is ours. Inasmuch as he can walk away from the project at any moment. With the disastrous showing, however, he didn’t balk, so there’s reason to suspect that he really does like the film. Let me back up a bit and explain.
See, I’d worked on subtitles all last week too. They’ve been the particular thorn in my side, the pebble in my shoe, the gauntlet in my face for many days now, and I had reached a point of reasonable happiness with their construction and syncopation with the film. But I ran out of time, as is usual in these cases, and didn’t have a chance to test the DVD before rushing off to meet Bobby and our composer. Yes. He is ours…
So we’re watching the film, and as it progresses, the subtitles are growing increasingly behind. First it’s just a micro second. Not bad at all. Then it becomes a macro second. Soon it’s multiple macro seconds, with epochs passing between the actor saying his lines and the subsequent captioning. It was painful. It was hellishly excruciating. It was Sisyphean in its longevity and interminable nature. I was writhing on the inside. But our composer, our poor composer (Yes. He is ours.) sat there and took it in.
Like Hell.
I could sense the pain, the aggravation, the anger he was feeling. I would have been feeling it too. It was bad form to show the film as it was. Unprofessional. But the film finally ended, and he didn’t throw up all over the place, which certainly raised my spirits. He said he liked it, overall. He felt the temp score didn’t do justice to the feel of it. Thought it could be cut down a bit (we agreed). Liked the story. Liked the look of the film. And Yes. He is ours.
So today I’ll be venturing out to his place (my penance) in Sherman Oaks to drop off a new DVD that contains fixed subtitles. I discovered that it was a frame mismatch problem that occurred between the output of the subtitle script and the burning of the DVD. Essentially, differing timecodes get lined up, and thus you’re screwed from frame one. They’re still not perfect, but they at least sync up. And it makes watching so much more palatable.
Did I mention how much I hate subtitles?
But I actually love them. Because it’s just one step closer to a finished film. And that’s a beautiful thing. Dante can go to Hell. I’m in Purgatorio now. Moving upward and onward to Beatrice.