South Pacific - Part 2 of 13

There is Nothing Like a Dick

This is the song that I already posted a while ago.  I'm repeating it now to put it in its proper sequence in the story.  In the movie, the men at the base, frustrated by the absence of females, sing There is Nothing Like a Dame.  In my version, There is Nothing Like a Dick, their frustration could easily be remedied if they would just look around them.

Note: for those interested in how I made these videos, some of them were a challenge.  Here's what I did for There is Nothing Like a Dick and many of the other songs:

1. I had to find a video of the original song from the 1958 movie.  Luckily, most of the songs from the movie are available on YouTube.

2. Because I changed the words, I couldn't use the soundtrack from  the movie, so I had to make my own soundtrack.  I had to find an instrumental version of the song with no voices.  In many cases I was able to use a karaoke version of the song.

3. Then I needed to supply the voices.  Using the Finale music composition program, I created a composition for men's voices matching the original song.  Finale has a great built-in sampled-sound synthesizer that generates very realistic sounds for all kinds of instruments as well as tenor, baritone and bass voices (among others), but they are wordless voices that just go ah-ah-ah.  I don't have software to actually sing words.

4. I then put together the three tracks: video, instrumental audio, and voice audio, plus the subtitles, using the iMovie video editing program on my Macintosh.

5. Now came the hard part.  The three tracks were all playing at slightly different speeds.  I needed to get them all in sync.  I changed the tempo of my voice composition in Finale until it matched the tempo of the karaoke music.  But the resulting combined audio was still playing at a different speed than the movie video.  That meant the audio singing didn't match the video movement of the singer's mouths.

6. Luckily, iMovie lets you change the speed of the various components of the video that you're creating.  If I changed the speed of the music and voices, that would change the pitch of the music, which is no good.  Instead, I adjusted the speed of the video track.  I only needed to speed up or slow down the video by a few percent, which is not noticeable, to make it synchronize with the music and voices.

7. Whew!  Like I said, it was a challenge.  Some of the other songs were even more challenging, because in some cases, either the original video or the instrumental music changed tempo in the middle of the song, speeding up or slowing down slightly, which made it almost impossible to completely synchronize everything.  I did the best I could, but if you see places in these songs where the video, music, and/or voices are slightly out of sync, please be forgiving.