Sunday, June 7, 2009

Work! Or Sink!

Haven't touched the blog in a month. Been really busy with a whole mess of things.

Actually, I wrote two entries but failed to up them. One was about being a guest at Superfest... Briefly, it was a lot of fun and I saw a bunch of film people I hadn't seen in a while, especially since the Godzilla films are no longer in production. The best was catching up with classic Toho actor Tsuchiya, who was in my documentary "Bringing Godzilla Down to Size." I took a photo of the two of us but can't seem to find it in my mess of a hard drive! The other was my ordeal trying to get an iPhone. I spent almost 8 hours dealing with Japanese cell-phone company nonsense and had to finally give up and stick with my current company docomo, which is a company I absolutely LOATH!

I spent the past week creating subtitles for directors Nishimura and Tomomatsu's upcoming film "Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl. " That was a load of work, but I enjoyed doing it. I spent two days at Nishimura's studio on the East side of Tokyo re-writing and adjusting the timing of the subs. Man! It's such precise work! My goal on this (as with other subtitling jobs I've done, including my own films) is to help the non-Japanese speaking audience get as close to the spirit of the film as is possible. Bad subs can, unfortunately, cause people to perceive the film as being no good, so I felt a great responsibility.

There were a few instances where there was just no translation that matched the wholly zany Japanese way of viewing the world. At those spots I would explain my approach to Nishimura and, after bouncing ideas around, came up with what I felt was something within the character of the film. Actually, those are my favorite moments when doing this kind of work. It's when I can get creative.

Silly me. I forgot to take photos, so the photos here I swiped from Nishimura's blog (I also stole this photo of Vampire Girl star Yukie Nakamura as I took it on set... A pretty good shot (if I do say so myself) of a very pretty woman....covered in blood! :


I was going to put up a link to the film's trailer, but I can't seem to find it on-line at the moment. I watched the latest trailers at Nishimura's yesterday and think they look really good. It's a fun movie and I'm proud to do some kind of work on the film. I also took some great set photos when I visited the set a few months back. A couple of them found their way onto Nishimura's blog.

I've been busting my rear getting a rough edit of my film "It's All Good" together. That, too, is tough work. I have one more day of shooting, which is scheduled for next weekend. In the film, a TV is constantly on in the background reporting world news. I had to write a script for this and it was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. As I've set the film in the near future, I had to imagine how current events might play out in 8 years time. Also, the timing had to be exact, matching when I want to cut to a close up of the TV. The actress I got for the newscaster part is Ako, who is a regular on the Entertainment show Fox Backstage Pass on air here in Japan. Ako is a really fun person with a real glow about her. I'm looking forward to the shoot and working with her.

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