Nick writes:
> Now, if someone was to offer an absolutely reliable letter-for-letter
> transcription of the original script which we could then format into
> a book, the job would be much, much easier.
"Absolutely reliable letter-for-letter transcription" is a rather
difficult goal! I know that my own transcriptions of UFO scripts
have had a few errors in them, but generally they are 99.99%
accurate. As for the issue of difficulty, I know that these
were difficult in the old days, but I found that my most recent
transcription (THE LONG SLEEP script) was fairly easy. I think
this was a combination of an excellent copy plus a better scanner
and better optical character recognition software. The character
recognition was so accurate that there wasn't much for me to
manually correct. I think it only took me a weekend to transcribe
that script.
And one shouldn't trivialize the job of formatting a transcription
into a book. I've reformatted some of these scripts for publication
in the SHADO-USECC newsletter, and I find that going through and
removing line breaks, indenting, adding bold type-face is pretty
time consuming -- in fact, I think it takes me longer to do this
than it does to transcribe a script! And of course, Fanderson
does additional work, like adding photographs, getting comments
from the original actors, getting it professionally printed, etc.
So Nick, if a 99.99% accurate transcription is acceptable, I'd
be happy to transcribe some UFO scripts for Fanderson. Although
I think you'll find that many of the most interesting UFO scripts
are already transcribed and available on my UFO website... :-)
--
Marc Martin,
[hidden email]
Locked
