"Hey that's my brother!" and manly squeals

I had an early morning meeting with the client to review the rough cut of the Seaport video. Now this client is very sharp, and she’s fair and particular. But she’s also tough and hard to please. So I had a little apprehension going into this. We watched the video twice before she had any comments. She really liked it. She also was amazed that we found some of the footage that we had in it. Many shots she had never seen before. Overall she was quite happy and proud of our effort. She only wanted a few minor changes to picture, a couple more Arabic-type music selections for the soundtrack. As she was leaving, she dropped a bomb. We’ll also need an English voice over version. It sounds simple, it is…but its really time consuming. If only she would have told me that two weeks ago when I did the Arabic voice over.

I had just finished the subtitles for the entire project. That is some amazingly tedious work. Not only do you have to figure out how to break up the script, but you have to size the fonts correctly, make sure the white letters can be seen against light/white backgrounds, figure out where to place the text in accordance with both Arabic and picture. For an 11 minute video I probably created 500 individual text boxes. I guess that is what an editor does. I was so tempted to give it to my editor Saji, but his English isn’t the greatest so that probably wouldn’t have been the best move. But I finally got it done. It was funny. There was one sequence near the end where I did a boat montage from the newest boats to the oldest to show the progression of time. We start out on a freighter then push back to a Bahraini paddling a boat. When Khalifa saw it, he said…”That’s my brother!” This footage we got from Bahrain TV was shot by Khalifa. No wonder they were so willing to give it to us. Writing of Bahrain TV we finally got the meeting set up with the head of all of Bahrain Radio and Television. This potentially is a very big deal. I am going to pitch “The Funniest Person in Bahrain” to him as a TV series. Hopefully we can set up a pipeline where we can be a program producer for them. They do have a staff of producers, editors and techs, but they don’t have a lot of experience and the shows aren’t very good. Hopefully this can turn into something. They don’t have a lot of money, but we’ll see how it goes. This is an important step as I try to reposition KSDi as an entertainment company. If we can learn our craft with Bahrain TV and get really good, that might ultimately open up the door for more Middle East opportunities…and ultimately global opportunities. The journey of 1000 miles starts with one step. Hopefully we’ll take that step on Thursday so keep us in your prayers.

I had dinner with my new German and Swiss friends. The Ministry of Culture has flown down a crew to research and document pearl divers. Im trying to talk them into expanding and doing full fledged documentaries rather than just audio recordings. Im really liking this group of people. Im having them over to my place for lunch tomorrow. They can’t eat in their offices since they work for the Government, so they have to go out. This is just another great example of being afforded the opportunity to befriend vastly different people for different cultures. These people look like me…they just don’t sound like me.

I got all excited today. I am running low on my Diet coke rations. Im down to my emergency supply of the last six pack. So I headed to the store. Imagine my delight when I saw the sign that all U.S. brands of chips on sale. Im pretty sure I squealed. But it was a manly squeal. My weakness are Fritos. Sometimes they have them here…sometimes they don’t. Since they are an import item, they are really expensive. A $4 bag of chips will cost me $8 here. So all the chips were discounted to $4. So I bought every bag they had in stock, which is about 8. Not only that, they had real Diet Coke Caffeine Free on sale. Now they don’t sell Diet Coke here. They sell something called Coke Light which tastes vastly different from Diet Coke. I’ve only seen Caffeine Free Diet Coke one time here a few months ago and it was like $1 a can. These were on sale for a more manageable $0.40 a can. So I bought a case. I’ll probably go back and buy the other case tomorrow. I have turned into my father. Im making all my shopping stores my personal Costco.