1/4" reel to reel

Today was a whole lot easier than I thought it would be. Which hopefully is a good omen. I’m hoping this week will be a whole lot easier than I anticipate. October is almost over….Yay!!!!! I had a conversation with God today (boy I know how strange that must sound, but we really do have conversations). He let me know that the worst of the six weeks is over whew… So today I got up to do the new voice over for project #3. We went into a very old but workable studio. They recorded the session on ¼” reel to reel. Are you serious? Yes..I am serious. It felt like I was in the 1960’s. The VO guy was great. I was following along the script in Arabic, and remember I don’t speak, read or write it. But I could tell when he was making mistakes and cut in, and it turns out I was right. Im learning so much about communication. Words are not that important when you communicate. Being over here is really helping hone my listening skills. So we got the project done in half the time that I anticipated. So I promptly came home and took a nap. Russ cancelled our weekly racquetball game so I had extra time to go kayaking before the edit session for project #2 at 4. Where I throw the kayak in the water is always an adventure. If it is High tide, I back my mini SUV to the water and throw the kayak in the water in one smooth motion. If it is low tide, I have to traipse the kayak out about 300 feet or so. When you are carrying a kayak that is pretty heavy that 300 feet does make a difference. High tide makes me happy…low tide makes me depressed. There is a lot of garbage on this makeshift beach. I drove around and found a spot where I can throw the kayak in the water from about 15 feet even at low tide. The problem is I have to traverse down some treacherous rocks to go those 15 feet. But I managed. The water was extremely calm today. It makes me feel more fit as I can go almost twice as fast time wise when the water is like glass. My kayak actually leaves a small little wake. There are these fish that skip across the water like you would skip a stone, that’s always cool to see. Its also cool to watch a sea gull swoop down into the water and nail a fish. The weather was warm today about 90. The water is getting cooler slowly. Its now about 84 degrees…still pretty amazing for ocean water. But I think I can kayak for awhile since I don’t really get all that wet. Its such great exercise, physical and spiritual.

I got done and made it into the office by 4 for our edit session. I was really worried because I thought we were failing. The clients, I thought were being so particular about their Arabic. That’s why we had to keep changing it. But Reji helped me figure out the problem. The original script was translated by an Egyptian/Saudi and was adapted by a Lebanese/Austrian. It turns out the Arabic is like phonetics and there are different dialects. The clients were wanting to edit to the Bahraini dialect, so no wonder there were so many changes. It was like it was in a different language. This is one of those things that I’m learning from all of this. Next time around everything will go much smoother. I’m very good at learning from my mistakes. So they had lots of changes and we made them right on the spot. About three hours later it was clear they were getting antsy and one by one they all left. So we made the last minute changes and they are coming over for a last minute review tomorrow. Hopefully its done and dusted.

So that means I really have one more project to finish, (project #3) then I’ll be all caught up. The problem is, I have only two days to get the project done. But im pretty confident that I can do it. I work so much better when its one project at a time.