Hollywood
China bitten by the reality TV bug
MUMBAI: The reality TV genre is creating waves in China. A new show which has been modelled on The Apprentice sees contestants pitching their plans for start-up businesses. The show is called Wise Man Takes All and received thousands of applications.
The one with the best proposal will win $123,000 and the chance to use the winnings as start-up capital. Losing contestants will not be subject to the famous catchphrase, “You’re Fired”.
Wise Man Takes All is the latest in a line of reality TV productions to have captured the imagination of the Chinese people, more used to a diet of historical soap operas, game shows and propaganda.
Each of the 10,000-plus applicants for the show have had to submit a business plan outlining how they would spend the prize. The applicants, aged between 20 and 40, will be whittled down to 16 who will be on the show in preliminary interviews to be held in Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Wuhan and Shenzhen.
One of Shanghai’s biggest property tycoons, Vincent Lo Hongshui is a backer. Most of the plans submitted are linked to the IT industry,
Most of China’s 350 million households have televisions and 40 million sets are sold each year. There are now more than 3,000 television stations in China, most of which are local rather than national, and the government has outlined plans to expand the fledgling cable TV network. Advertisers are scrambling to take advantage of the huge audiences.
MUMBAI: Jacques Barreau has spent two decades helping Hollywood speak the world’s languages. From The Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter, the dubbing specialist at TransPerfect Media has built a career on making stories travel seamlessly across borders. Yet nothing in his global playbook quite prepared him for Mumbai’s streets.
On his first trip to India, Barreau is not sightseeing but sprinting between workshops and conferences, evangelising the craft of localisation. “I’m not enjoying it at all; I’m just working,” he says cheerfully. “Work, work, work. But I’m very happy and excited to share my knowledge. I just have to come back to discover more of India.” For now, India remains largely unseen beyond studios and seminar rooms.
The culture shock, however, has arrived in full force, on the roads.
“What surprises me is how people don’t get killed every day while riding their motorcycles in the traffic,” he says, still sounding incredulous. He has seen congestion in Vietnam, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Mumbai, he insists, is another league. “Everybody is crossing in all directions. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”
Food, at least, poses no such puzzle. Barreau approaches Indian cuisine the way he approaches dubbing: as variation on a universal theme. “Indian food is just a local variation of world cuisines,” he shrugs. “It’s all the same with different variations. Overall, it’s all good.”
That instinct for finding common structure beneath surface difference runs through his philosophy of sound and storytelling. As a classically trained musician and jazz player, Barreau leans on ideas from The Golden Number, a book on proportion he studied at the conservatory. The same ratios, he argues, shape concertos, paintings and even a snail’s shell. Art, at its core, follows patterns.
“Proportions are very important. They’re very similar across different art forms all over the world,” he says. A concerto has an introduction, development and conclusion; so does a well-built story. The principle travels.
Voice acting, in his view, is no different from music. The task is to grasp the creator’s intent, then reinterpret it without betrayal. “I understand how a character works, then I adapt it to my language, to my culture,” he explains. Indians, Chinese and Italians do the same for their audiences. Local flavour, global skeleton.
Barreau’s mission in India is to pass on that thinking to a new generation of voice talent. The Taj Mahal remains on his wish list, deferred to a future trip. For now, the classroom calls louder than the tourist trail.
He may help films cross borders for a living, but Mumbai has reminded him that some crossings, especially at rush hour, demand more courage than craft.
