A perfectionist out of water

I had a new recording job at the start of this week.  Not just the usual crappy Chinese educational publisher gig, but working for a prestigious foreign employer; not just a done-it-a-million-times-before batch of Chinglish dialogues, but a proper voiceover.

I was actually a little nervous, for once.  But I was also looking forward to being able to take a little more care over the work than usual - to discussing with the client exactly what they wanted, to experimenting a little with the phrasing and the style of the delivery, to laying down alternate takes for the client to choose from or edit together.

Unfortunately.... my liaison was not a foreigner but a Chinese girl... with fairly limited English, and no interest whatever in the job she'd been given to do.  And we were having to use a recording studio in a Chinese media company, so... the engineer wasn't very adept or very industrious either.  He wasn't going to attempt any editing; he just wanted to throw the switch once and then forget about me.  When I did - inevitably - stumble over a word here or there, he huffed and puffed for minutes in trying to locate the right place to resume the recording (on one occasion having to play through almost the whole recording up to that point - twice; although, luckily, we hadn't laid down very much by that point).  He seemed to be attempting to communicate to me by this incompetence that he had something else he'd far rather be doing, and that I'd better get this shitty little job done in one take.  The girl representing the client was even more uninterested: she didn't pay any attention to what was happening at all. I could have been making gaffes left and right, pronouncing all the proper names incorrectly or inconsistently (I have recurring moments of guilty panic that perhaps I did on occasion), or peppering the recording with under-the-breath obscenities.  She wouldn't have known or cared.

It is fortunate that I've been doing this work for so long now - and almost invariably trying not only to get everything down in a single take, but to do so while sight-reading - that I have become fairly skillful at reading without errors, and at deciding on appropriate phrasing and intonation impromptu.  And for this job, I had at least been given the scripts a few days in advance (an unheard-of luxury!), so I'd had an opportunity to do a few small polishes and re-writes, check up on the pronunciation of some tricky names, and have a couple of full practice read-throughs.  Without that little bit of advance preparation, I might have made a right pig's ear of it.  I'm still a mite dissatisfied with the standard of my work on this - but it was done in such a headlong rush (ONE TAKE!), what could the client really expect?

I found it a very depressing experience.  I had been hoping that this might be a really interactive session, that I'd be collaborating with the client's representatives and the studio staff to try to produce something really good.

But in China, nobody gives a damn.  I think they have a conceptual blindspot about the pursuit of perfection, about trying to make something "as good as we can make it".  Here, all they seem to care about is making something "good enough".