Thai RAVAGE
You haven’t lived until you’ve seen your movie dubbed into a foreign language! Wow. What a surreal experience! The Thailand DVD of RAVAGE arrived last week. I turned on the English subtitles, which made it almost seem like someone else’s movie. At last, evidence that my efforts at typing up those tedious dialog-continuity scripts weren’t futile. There were a couple of typos, but nothing as hilarious as your standard Hong Kong flick from the same time period. What was funny was hearing how over-the-top some of the professional voice actors sounded for their respective characters. Best of all, of course was Dan Rowland’s Thai baritone cartoonish bad-guy voice. The good guys & girls sounded a little too sweet and kind while the baddies’ voices were deep and tough. Awesome...
Hopefully, some aspiring filmmaker out there will learn from some of my sound-editing mistakes. A couple of the dialog scenes needed background sound like road noise during a driving-in-the-car scene full of dialog. I never bothered to proof the entire music & effects track other than the big action scenes. Footsteps and other clean stuff recorded on the live track went onto the hi-fi dialog track and I neglected to shift them onto the M & E track a few times. Pretty embarrassing. But that just gets chalked up to so many other flaws a filmmaker cringes at, viewing his own work that most often slips under the radar of the casual viewer. At least those scenes had music there most of the time. Of course, the sound quality of the dubbed Thai dialog was way better than the hissy, mono analog sound. Another artifact of my pre-digital age of micro-budget movie-making. However, a couple of times, I was aware that it was sounding richer than I expected it to. The DVD menu (which is really professional-looking; much better than what’s on the domestic release) identifies the tracks as being Dolby 5.1, so maybe the Thai guys put a little extra effort into sweetening the sound. There are no new separation effects into the surround channels; just the same stuff spread out.
Another oddity was some censorship in the movie. Two bits were eliminated: during the police-station shootout, “Game’s over mother-fucker!” and the shotgunning of the female cop was cut out. That shotgun just magically appears in Lei Renniks' hands! And at the climax, the money shot of Dan’s bloody, screaming death was trimmed. That kinda sucks for the Thai audience that the pay-off has been cut out! But they’ll never know it. From such a cheap little movie, they’ll probably just elicit it as sloppy editing with dime-store make-up effects. Oh well. In a way, it’s kinda satisfying to know that the ultra-violence in my movie was too extreme for Thailand!
diabolikdvd.com has the SINISTRE DVD listed as available. Dunno what's up with that. It's not supposed to be released until April 25th and I haven't heard from the distributor if it's really ready or not. Guess I better send an email to SRS Cinema...
note: Please don't email me via the Borderline Entertainment website. I cannot access my messages there anymore. MySpace is the best way to contact me for the time being. The link is at "Ronnie's blog" on the site.
Hopefully, some aspiring filmmaker out there will learn from some of my sound-editing mistakes. A couple of the dialog scenes needed background sound like road noise during a driving-in-the-car scene full of dialog. I never bothered to proof the entire music & effects track other than the big action scenes. Footsteps and other clean stuff recorded on the live track went onto the hi-fi dialog track and I neglected to shift them onto the M & E track a few times. Pretty embarrassing. But that just gets chalked up to so many other flaws a filmmaker cringes at, viewing his own work that most often slips under the radar of the casual viewer. At least those scenes had music there most of the time. Of course, the sound quality of the dubbed Thai dialog was way better than the hissy, mono analog sound. Another artifact of my pre-digital age of micro-budget movie-making. However, a couple of times, I was aware that it was sounding richer than I expected it to. The DVD menu (which is really professional-looking; much better than what’s on the domestic release) identifies the tracks as being Dolby 5.1, so maybe the Thai guys put a little extra effort into sweetening the sound. There are no new separation effects into the surround channels; just the same stuff spread out.
Another oddity was some censorship in the movie. Two bits were eliminated: during the police-station shootout, “Game’s over mother-fucker!” and the shotgunning of the female cop was cut out. That shotgun just magically appears in Lei Renniks' hands! And at the climax, the money shot of Dan’s bloody, screaming death was trimmed. That kinda sucks for the Thai audience that the pay-off has been cut out! But they’ll never know it. From such a cheap little movie, they’ll probably just elicit it as sloppy editing with dime-store make-up effects. Oh well. In a way, it’s kinda satisfying to know that the ultra-violence in my movie was too extreme for Thailand!
diabolikdvd.com has the SINISTRE DVD listed as available. Dunno what's up with that. It's not supposed to be released until April 25th and I haven't heard from the distributor if it's really ready or not. Guess I better send an email to SRS Cinema...
note: Please don't email me via the Borderline Entertainment website. I cannot access my messages there anymore. MySpace is the best way to contact me for the time being. The link is at "Ronnie's blog" on the site.
posted by Ronnie Sortor at 5:46 AM
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