Quote:
Originally Posted by Stephen@Cult Labs  Talking of which, who's idea was it to include the old Hong Kong theatrical subtitles? One of the coolest extras I think i've ever seen. Wish more releases had them. |
Given how much work it took, I'm not surprised they don't!
All of it was my work - on a mad whim, I pitched the idea to Eureka (I'd always promised myself that if I ever oversaw a classic HK film I'd do something similar), and they said they didn't have any budget for it. So I said "well, give me some other freelance work, and I'll do them for nothing", and they were as good as their word.
The major challenge was replicating them. Unfortunately, the nature of Hong Kong subtitles means that they're invariably burned into prints, so there was no electronic source to draw on. Also, hardcore HK film fans like myself know that the Chinese subtitles are a crucial part of the overall aesthetic, and as far as I was concerned they weren't optional even if I couldn't personally read them. Fortunately, I was able to get hold of a set of Chinese electronic subtitles, which I reformatted to match the layout of the originals as closely as I could - and then painstakingly transcribed the English text from an old VCD, taking care to reproduce every last misspelling and typo.
It took
forever, not least because David Mackenzie and I also had to do various experiments with fonts to make sure that we could display both character sets while at the same time replicate the effect of the original. I also had to compromise a bit because it turned out that the subtitles had been added to a slightly shorter cut of the film - so I ended up resorting to normal subtitles to fill in the missing passages, which is slightly jarring but I didn't have much alternative (I didn't think it was remotely ethical to attempt writing crappy English ones off my own bat). But I'm thrilled with how they turned out - in fact, that whole release was a joy to work on.
(Although I do regret the fact that they couldn't get hold of the original English dub track, which would have made it a perfect release. And I have cause to regret it more than most because I was about twenty minutes into transcribing it for HOH subtitling purposes when they pulled the plug - they just couldn't track down the rightsholder and their contract with Sony demanded that it be released before the end of April, so they had no choice.)