Media Missionary Focus

Doing the Dub

Today I am looking at two different projects that both involve bringing media programs from outside Cambodia into the country and re-doing them for use here.

The first is one that I am actively involved in; Dan and Louie. Dan and Louie is an audio program for kids featuring Dan Betzer telling Bible stories to his ventriloquist dummy, Louie. We have taken the stories, kept the basic themes and content, changed Louie from a dummy to a little boy, changed the context of the stories to and jokes to fit in Cambodia, and are now recording them with Cambodian voice talent for radio broadcast. I think this is going to work very well; Cambodia’s illiteracy rate and traditions use story telling to communicate, and this is basically an older man using stories to teach a young boy about how to know God and live for Him.

The other project is something I just heard about. A man who works with Billy Graham Films is coming to Cambodia next week to look at possibly dubbing some of their films into Khmer for use here. Now, we have done film dubs in the past, but that was awhile ago when there weren’t many alternatives. In addition, we were very particular about what films we would dub. We only looked at doing those that spoke to a particular need here in Cambodia. Doing anything in media simply because you can is the wrong approach.

Now I’m not saying that dubbing these films is the wrong thing to do, but I’m a bit skeptical about it. Like I said, we have done it in the past, and the result at that time was mixed at best. I’d be happy to listen to the man when he comes, but as it turns out I won’t be in country while he is here. So I’ll point him in the direction of some other groups and let them work it out. I already know that given my current level of commitment on various other projects there is no way I would be able to do this kind of film dubbing project even if I wanted to.

On the other hand, I just had a few people listen to the first rough edit of the Dan and Louie program and got some mixed response (we are planning to do some more field testing of the stories to see what works best before we start any broadcasts).

Bringing any media product from outside the country is less than ideal. And anything that you do bring in, the more you can re-work it to fit into the culture, the better off you are. Our goal is to develop a group of people here who are able to produce original media programs for Cambodia.

posted by Troy In Cambodia @ 6:06 PM