ErinLaing.com

Birthday Girl will have its Quebec premiere at the Rendez-Vous du Cinéma Québécois! The festival runs from February 14th to the 24th, 2008.

Birthday Girl will be playing at Cinéma du Parc on Thursday February 21st at 6:45pm.

Here’s a list of other films playing at the festival and where you can pick up your tickets.

New media producer/distributor ON Networks and South by South West Film Conference and Festival have teamed up this year to launch The Greenlight Awards, a competition aimed at discovering the next great digital web series. Two prizes are being awarded, $10,000 for best original production and $2,000 for best original idea. Deadline is February 15th 2008.

SXSW Film Festival Producer Matt Dentler said in a statement “Episodic content for mobile and Web technology is the future for many independent filmmakers and creative artists.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Check out the press release here.

Submit your projects here.

We had the film subtitled in French for Télé-Québec. They originally wanted a dubbed version of the film but my preference was to subtitle it. It’s more cost effective and less obtrusive.

The film is called Bonne fête ! in French. (One of the things I learned while subtitling the film is the use of a space between letters and punctuation marks.)

I didn’t realise that film translation is completely different from other forms of translation. Not only is the translator responsible for being faithful to the language, tone and sensibility of the film but they have to do it within the confines of a very precise formula. Film subtitling involves video/audio coordination, timing, choice of words so that the timing can be respected, all done with a strict number of characters per line (I think it’s between 35-40) and very few seconds that you are allowed per line (lines per second).

It just so happens that my aunt is a retired translator and did the subtitling for us. We worked through a couple of drafts to make sure that the subtleties in the humour came across and that it read they way kids speak.

She created a text document with corresponding time codes which was then given to Vision Globale. They in turn used a machine called the Symphonie to generate the subtitles. We used this machine so that we could create white subtitles with a drop shadow.

Everything worked out great in the end. I love being able to watch the film in another language.

Now I have to find out when it will air on Télé-Québec.