Boogie called me up last night as I was editing. W…
Boogie called me up last night as I was editing. We talked for a long time, as we have tended to do ever since we met in college. He told me that he has finally decided to leave Taiwan and live in the states for a year or so, just to see what happens. He’s been here nearly as long as I have, but his Taiwanese wife Amanda is living in the US now, and I think she probably wants to make her life there. I used to be waiting for Boogie to move out of his room over off Ren-ai Road so I could move in, but now I think it’s probably too small. Also, Boogie told me that he often sees nurses fleeing the Cathay Hospital’s SARS ward late at night for surrepticious trips to 7-Eleven. Probably not the best choice. For the same amount of money I could probably get a much nicer place a little ways out of the city anyway.
I put the soundtrack and subtitles on Episode 4 last night, and this morning I went over to the production company of Vincent, who appears in Episode 5 as a thug. The place is located in an old two-story house, part of a row of houses in an alley behind the Howard Plaza Hotel on Ren-ai near Fu-xing South Road. There’s a nifty garden in front, and the interior’s been re-done. They’re rent is NT$70k a month, so each producer has to make at least NT$10k a month to break even. It’s a really nice, comfortable place; I certainly wouldn’t mind working there. They mostly do post-production work on films. Vincent got one of his co-workers to let me borrow their equipment to copy the file onto a DVD-ROM, as it’s too big to fit on a CD-ROM. I was thinking of buying a DVD burner, but they are really expensive. I’ll probably have to buy one eventually, though, especially if we want to do a DVD, complete edition of the Lady X episodes put together, which, with all the extra footage, could be as long as 20 minutes, or the length of a half-hour TV show if you factor in commercials, etc. We could also have subtitle choices and some simple features. I still don’t know exactly what we would do with it, but it would be a cool thing to have, anyway.
After I got the DVDs I took one over to the closet 7-Eleven to send in to the executive producer in Japan. It turns out, however, that the DHL service at 7-Eleven only sends documents; they told me to go to the DHL office on Jianguo North Road, so, pissing and moaning in the pouring rain, I hailed a cab to take me there. Just after I had paid the almost NT$1600 to send a package to Japan as quickly as possible (“It will be even quicker in July,” they told me, “and also even more expensive.”), I turned around to see a friend of mine walk in. I vaguely recalled that he worked for DHL in Zhonghe; he just happened to be passing through the main office. He told the lady at the counter to give me the employee price, which was under NT$400. Funny how things work out sometimes.
So, Episode 4 is done. I came up with a poster that exhibits less-than-elegant design, but I like it. Feel free to take it and use it (no, not for a Fark photoshop contest! I mean use it in a good way). Now I have to concentrate on Episode 5, which is even more complicated than Episode 4, but should turn out to be a real beauty of an episode when we finally get it all done up.
