Digging to China

Remember in the cartoons?

Like you could dig to China?
Or run off a cliff and keep running in thin air as long as you didn't look down?
Or that if you blew up - it only blew up your clothes - and made you dirty?
Or that when you're really hungry and you look at someone else - they turn into a steak?

Be nice if life was like that.

Got a good news bad news today.

Bad news is I need to be in China for a month to finish this next cut. So I'll go home for a week and then have to come back for four straight.

Good news is - company will pay for my family to come out and spend part of the summer here.

Bad news is - my wife's mom is really sick - possibly with cancer - and she needs help. So she is most likely headed there instead of here.

Bad news wins.

Not at all like the cartoons. Unless there are some really sucky cartoons I never knew about.

Editing is still progressing. Ready to throw in the towel yesterday - but today is better.... starting to see a show in there somewhere. Still have some impossibly tight deadlines that I just don't see us making... but I am diligently forging ahead as best we can - smiling with that American can do attitude.

Sent a rough scene to Shanghai the other day. It was a four mintue rough cut of a scene that really shouldn't run any longer than 1 to 1 and a half minutes.

The big guy there wrote back and said he didn't like it.

It was too long.
Boring.
Needs to be cut down.

Sigh.

What does it take to make people understand this process?

Changes here get tricky.

I was using a byte from our celeb to open the show. Then we realized it really is just too long. So I rewrote it as a voice over. Then I sent it to one of my assistants to translate - emphasizing that we need it to sound good in Chinese. Who cares about the English.

She does it.

Then today I send it to Shanghai.

Who translated this? They wanna know. I tell them it doesn't matter. Does it work or not?

(Cause I can't read Chinese.... I know... I'm like Johnny Cash....)

Well... it doesn't sound right.

Now granted... any copywriter - even in his own language - is used to words being changed all the time... but this process is killing me. And this literally is for three sentances....

So they change a few words... and four hours later send it back.

We record it - put it in - and its the first I hear it. And its fine. But so was the first version. But so what? I always go with the native over my own view of proper Chinese. Hell - I lose a lot of copy battles in English as well....

But that's my day. A three sentance fight.

Now I live to fight another day.