Dubbing Contest

Last night we went over to the other campus to be judges in a "Dubbing Contest". It was a contest where a four minute section of a movie was shown without the sound and a group of students would stand in front of it and dub in the words. They were extremely proficient and did a great job with the lip sync. There were 18 groups to judge and there were 8 judges - 4 Chinese teachers of English and 4 native English teachers. There wasn't one group that didn't do well. Luckily there had previously been run-offs because something like 70 groups originally participated.

I didn't really understand what was to happen so when the first group came on I thought that they were showing us the movie with sound and then the students were going it act it out, but about 3/4 of the way through I realized that the sound was coming from the students. They did scenes from such movies as "The Devil Wore Prada", "I am Sam", "Gone with the Wind", "Madagascar", "Shark Tale", "Lord of the Rings" and others. The performances were exceptional. However, it was funny to hear their Chinese accents come back as soon as they finished performing.

There were students from two of my classes who participated.