Current mood:

exhausted

Dubbing an Advertisement
I just got back from Shanghai where I spent the day dubbing an advertisement over in English for a Chinese pharmaceutical company. I did this not for the money but because it sounded interesting. However, I didn't expect it to take up so much of my time. I left home at 5:30 a.m. this morning and didn't get back until almost 2:00 a.m., so I was away for over 20 hours.

The reason I had to leave so early is that there are only two trains to Shanghai Meilong Station in the morning, and the later one would have caused me to miss my 12:30 appointment. Thus I had to take the early train and got to Shanghai much earlier than necessary. Traveling between Hangzhou and Shanghai is always a pain in the ass.

The reason I got back so late was that the dubbing itself took much longer than expected. We had to keep trimming the English down to make it fit in the same space as the Chinese. English always requires much more time to say the same amount of stuff. I was originally told I would be finished in only three hours, but the process actually took six hours. Maybe this was party my fault because I would often make small errors and have to start over again at the beginning of a paragraph. This problem got worse and worse as my throat got numb and my brain got tired from all the endless repetition. Anyway, it was an interesting experience, but sitting in a sound-proof room all day does get pretty boring.

I found that my voice sounds much better when recorded in a recording studio on professional recording equipment than it does in real life. My voice kind of sounds wimpy and nerdy in real life, but it sounded pretty normal in the dubbed television commercial. Maybe it's because they cut out the frequencies that don't sound good using that giant mixer board with all the thousands of knobs and buttons.

On the trip back to Hangzhou I rode in one of those really old, rusty trains that don't have air conditioning and are full of peasants. It's a good thing it was late at night so it wasn't too hot. Also, all the windows were wide open, so there was a tremendous blast of wind in my face the whole way. The train was headed to Ningbo and Hangzhou was just a stop along the way, so I forced myself not to fall asleep. I didn't want to miss my station.