Dubbing the Luke Video

Thank you all who prayed about our dubbing the video of Luke. The Jesus film that many have seen or heard of was taken from an original film that included the entire gospel of Luke. This original film is 4 hours and 20 minutes long, broken up into 15 episodes, each 15-18 minutes long. Campus Crusade for Christ asked for rights to make the Jesus film from the original. To properly dub the Jesus film, the Biblical text must be cut down and paraphrased. To dub the Luke video, the already translated text from Luke had to be tweaked slightly to make sure that each block of text matches the time frame in the movie. It has been my thinking for quite some time now that if a people group has the book of Luke translated, and this media possibility is available, why not use it? When Mel Gibson did The Passion of the Christ, it hit me, that for the first time in my life, Jesus was not speaking American English. It is just the opposite for the Toussian. They have never heard Jesus speaking their language. I thought how wonderful it would be for the Toussiana to see and hear Jesus speaking their language. I believe God gave me the desire to make this available for them. I have enjoyed the entire process. Let me take you along on this journey. First, there was the initial editing the original script. The following example is from chapter 2 of the film or Episode 2 with the first two blocks of text. This example shows how the text is broken up by verses but at other times a verse was spread over several blocks especially if several people were speaking. The initial part of editing started with adding the French and the Toussian texts.

Then Madeleine and I worked on the Toussian text to change the style from indirect to direct since it was going to be in spoken style and not a narrative style. The text was edited several times with various members of the team. The English was taken out and then the French taken out, leaving only the Toussian text. We then read through the text while watching the video to see if the text would fit the time allowed and if the text matched what was going on in the film.

It was during this time that I discussed with Ken and Audrey Joslin about who might do the actual recording. Normally, an experienced person participates in a team’s first video dubbing so Ruth Henkel from the VMS department at JAARS in Waxhaw, N. Carolina came out to lend a hand. Due to constraints on Ruth’s schedule of activities for the fall in the U.S., it came about very quickly that Ruth needed to come earlier than expected. This hurried us to finish the last editing of the text.

Next, someone needed to make decisions about some of the practical aspects of the recording. Wilson Ouattara

took charge with Alphonse Ouattara as his assistant. Wilson is from the Protestant church and Alphonse is from the Catholic Church.

They helped with decisions as to who would play which roles, if meals would be provided as well as snacks for the break time, discussion as to paying people to play various roles, etc. Our regular team members worked their normal work-week schedule. Joseph became the narrator

and Soungalo spoke the part of Jesus

Other members were "verifiers" during the recording, following the text to see that the reading was done correctly.

Since I live next to a welder and close to the market, we decided that my house would not be the best location. Madeleine offered to speak to the Catholics about a retreat center that they have. We were given permission to use the facility and it was WONDERFUL!!!

It was quiet and peaceful. A cook was able to provide lunch every day.

In the end, we decided not to pay people who had a minor role to play but they could stay and eat. Some joined us and others left right away.

Joslins and Ruth arrived on Sunday, July 31 to be ready to begin on Monday morning.

Their vehicle was packed with recording equipment, their clothes and some food for the 3 weeks stay. They even brought a generator in case of a power cut (which they didn’t need). We used a room that is often used as a chapel for our recording use. Inside they set up a little recording studio.

It surprised me that even after all the text preparation we had done, many corrections were still needed. Especially when several times, a reader would say while reading, "This doesn’t sound natural, we have to change it". How many times had we been over this? Even when we had watched the video with the text, I kept asking, "Does this match?" Ruth assured me that this was normal and our group was not abnormal or unprepared. The "techy team", as I call them, needed a master script that had all changes, so often someone would have to let Ruth know the changes.

Each person doing the reading had to be educated as to the recording procedure. First, the technician had to set the sound level which meant that the reader read the first line into the microphone several times. Ken or Audrey would then say "Un, deux, trios" (one, two, three) which indicated that the person could begin speaking.

If a mistake was made mid-block, the person reading could say 1, 2, 3 and then restart at the beginning of the sentence. Through the marvel of technology, the "mistake" could just be cut out as easily as highlighting and deleting from a Word document. Ruth who does not speak French learned 1, 2, and 3 in French. We listened to the recorded block as soon as it was done. Sometimes we would even watch the video to see where to best place the audio recording.

We tried to match the lips as much as possible.

We pretty much started at episode 1 and went straight through to episode 15. Our "bit actors" came from time to time and we would fit them in.

This gave Joseph and Soungalo a break since the voices of Jesus and the narrator was the majority of the recording.

The original script was planned for the narrator, Jesus, 5 men, 2 women, one young boy, and 2 crowd scenes. However, we chose to involve as many people as possible. We used 43 people to play 70 different roles.

Each person had been given their role in advance and though we tried to prepare them in advance often the drama coach (me) had to work on the spot.

In one spot the reader was coached to over act. It seemed that when Annas is saying, "Away with this man! Release Barabbas to us!", he should sound angry. In the film it looked like he was asking for a glass of water. We had to re-record that bit because the tone of the voice didn’t match the action in the film. Trying to keep all our actors and parts organized and who would come when took some effort.

After the first couple of days when we had a couple of episodes done, one of the techy team needed to edit it before we could review it again. During the second week we found there was a national holiday and we were well enough ahead of schedule that the language team took a day off so the editing could get done. The technicians spent the entire day editing.

The second week-end, Joslins’ daughter and a couple of short term people came out for a visit; Kate from Northern Ireland, Luc-Olivier from Switzerland and Hannah from the U.S. They didn’t get to see the recording process but we took a day to visit our three tourist attractions, the domes, the waterfalls, and the cliff.

The last day of recording we took a group picture

of people that were there that day.

One of the positive aspects of this project was the participation of Catholics and Protestants. Pray with us that God will use this film in a mighty way.

• April 2006, Recording Genesis in Toussiana
• January 2006, Toussian Churches
• August 2005, Christian Jr. Hi in Toussiana
• July 2005, Pastor Pierre Wedding
• June 2005, Locust Plague
• April 2005, Branch Conference
• February 2005, Literacy Classes
• September 2004, Market Pictures
• August 2004, Return to Toussiana
• May 2004, In Memory of Wilhelm
• July 2003, Wilhelm’s Parents 50th Wedding Anniversary
• Feb. 2003, New Office Building
• Nov 2002, Reading Contest
• July 2002, Toussian Translators
• March 2002 Literacy classes
• Jan 2002 Bissa New Testament dedication
• January 15, 2002
• Nov 2002  Language learning, Translation, Revision, Ladies day at church
• Oct 2001  Sunday school outing, Fonio harvest
• Aug 2001  Cobly Reunion
• May 31, 2001  Return to Burkina Faso
• May 5, 2001  Germany, Az, Oregon office work
• Jan 2001  Our time in Germany

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