Sunday, August 05, 2007

Sound for the Deaf

We’re babysitting a house at the moment that has a wide-screen tv, and I mean wide-screen. Full-scale action movies appear as they would in the cinema. However, with the benefits of such a system come the negatives: the remote controls. There are two required to get the DVD working, and they have more buttons on them than the computer keyboard has keys. Not only that, many of them have more than one function. And if you don’t get things in the right sequence you don’t get the movie – or even the tv channels as we’ve just discovered.
Last night we watched Lost in Translation, the Bill Murray/Scarlett Johansson movie about a couple of insomniacs in Japan. It started off well, with a quirky sense of humour, but seemed to lose the plot (there wasn’t much of one) in the middle, and sagged for about a quarter of an hour. When we first tried to play it we got closed captioning – that system that not only tells you the dialogue but also indicates the sound effects. Mission Impossible III is on at the moment – the sound effects would be along the lines of car crash noises, glass breaking, more glass breaking, even more glass breaking, many people going Ahhhh!, villain mutters under his breath, and so on.
Lost in Translation was considerably quieter, for the most part, and only required things like: shower noise, phone rings.

2 comments:

Therese said...

I have found that there are a few different kinds of closed captioning out there.

Mike Crowl said...

Thanks for letting me know about that, Therese.