Susan Flirts With Fame!

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Yesterday brought a surprise or two. Let’s see what the world has in store for us today. At the moment, the slate of activities is totally blank.

Yesterday I responded to an e-mail from Salva Pellicer who, along with Pepe, is the co-owner of Magic Agora. He was looking for someone to dub the English version of a couple of promo spots that had been shot in Spanish. It needed to be a female voice. He asked me if I knew anyone who might be able to do the work. I spoke with Susan before I offered her services and she was agreeable. I let Salva know and he asked what afternoons we were free. I gave him three possibilities for next week, but it tuned out that the recording studio was booked those days so he asked if we could meet him at 4:00 that afternoon. We said yes.

After such exciting news the rest of our late morning was mundane. We walked down to Prácticas and bought a waste can and a toilet brush. After we set both in place, we decided that it would be best to have lunch at La Fórcola and we sat down at our table at 2:30. The place was filled to the rafters. We chose the menu of the day and both Susan and I started out with the avocado and shrimp salad that had a base of a variety of lettuces, some tomato, onions, avocado and shrimp. For the main course I opted for a vegetable pizza and Susan had the bowtie pasta with ham and Brie. Ice cream was the dessert of choice today. I chose chocolate and Susan had pineapple. We finished our coffee and headed out to find a cab.

At 4:00 PM the cab dropped us off at Triton Media where Magic Agora does its post-production. While Pepe worked on editing a video that was shot at the beginning of the week, Salva, Juan, Susan and I worked in the recording studio. It took about two hours to record two one-minute spots and a 30 second promo. I had translated the script into English a while back and now the challenge was to match up the length of each English phrase with the length of the Spanish phrase. The task was made all the more daunting because Spanish is a more poetic language than English and flows more easily. The Spanish spot starts with “Soy maga” and the English starts with I am a magician”. Obviously the meaning is the same, but the emotional undercurrent is totally different. We reworked the script in a number of places and finally we were all happy with the result. We hopped a cab and were back home a little before 7:00.

At 7:30 we were back on the street heading for the Cines Yelmo to see “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” in its original version. There were eight of us in the theater. We enjoyed the film greatly, especially Gary Oldman’s performance. On the way back we stopped at Olaya and had some calamares and some shrimp in garlic sauce. It was past midnight when we finally crashed.