full contact question

[cpardo]

I know the opening song "Get the Funk Out" is by Extreme II--who also did "More Than Words." I'm not sure who did the ending Cantonese song.

[Brian Thibodeau]

Was the closing song by Alan Tam, by any chance?

[mrblue]

It's "This World is Insane" by Alan Tam off of his album "Love Story".

I have a MP3 of it here:

http://www.hkfilm.net/multi/fullcont.zip

(pardon the low quality, I just ripped it straight from the DVD while it was playing)

[mrblue]

I just ran a male/male headphone cord from my PC's speaker to the mic input and used Windows Sound Recorder.

[cpardo]

wow. I had no idea that was Alan Tam singin at the end. good to know. Maybe info like that should be available on the database.

[Jin_X]

http://www.templeofchow.com/index2.html has the whole song... but you have to download winzip in order to listen to it... enjoy

[Brian Thibodeau]

Maybe info like that should be available on the database.

Good point. It's taken me a lot of work sometimes to decipher singer credits (if they even include them) at the end of movies when I write reviews, at least for the ones I can't recognize by voice. If I can't figure it out, or the credits are really fuzzy on a VCD, it's actually quite frustrating! I've seen so many HK review websites that credit a song with the leading actor or actress (because they figure that's usually the case) when in fact it's someone else. Once upon a time, I actually saw a magazine review of FULL CONTACT in which the writer assumed that Chow Yun-fat must have been singing that closing theme song. The only reason I knew otherwise was because I had an Alan Tam album and recognized his voice right away, even though I never knew the name of the song.

It would be awesome if the database had such info, but it would probably take ages to get it all in there, as people would have to provide a lot of screen shots of credits in order for the editors to verify the songs, and in far, far too many cases, particularly the golden years of the 80's and early 90's, the filmmakers simply pop in a song without giving any kind of credit to the singers.

[cpardo]

Yeah you make a good point. that's a lot of work--it was just an idea. Maybe it can done for the easier ones.

[bkasten]

Well, it sounds like we have at least three volunteers to contribute as music editors to the HKMDB?

Make no mistake, it IS a lot of work. The amount of work required to get to where HKMDB is now is in the thousands of person hours. If you look at the 15000+ editor submissions just for 2005, to the database, that alone constitutes at least several hundred person hours of data entry work. That excludes time to prepare data which varies with expertise. (HKMDB is very fortunate to have several very highly skilled editors).

So, if you have soundtrack information, by all means post it here in the forum, and in the meantime I will work on setting up music/soundtrack credits in the database. Initially soundtrack credits would probably just be text lists of song name and artist without any link or relation to other parts of the database. Of course, to do so would require that we start including musicians in the database, and then we get into having a musicians database. On the other hand a lot of popular vocalists are frequently in films, so we could at least in some cases link back to a person in the DB.

[Brian Thibodeau]

Would submissions necessarily have to be accompanied by screen shots in order to be considered? I know the singers of many songs from films (including the odd ones mislabelled on other sites), but don't really have the ability to capture screen shots (at least not on anything resembling a regular basis) and I don't usually know the name of the song as I can't read Chinese beyond identifying the performer names (unless there's an English translated title in the credits as well). I realize screen shots aid the process, but is there another resource editors can use to verify such information if it was submitted without them? Just wondering about the possibilities.

[bkasten]

Would submissions necessarily have to be accompanied by screen shots in order to be considered? I know the singers of many songs from films (including the odd ones mislabelled on other sites), but don't really have the ability to capture screen shots (at least not on anything resembling a regular basis) and I don't usually know the name of the song as I can't read Chinese beyond identifying the performer names (unless there's an English translated title in the credits as well). I realize screen shots aid the process, but is there another resource editors can use to verify such information if it was submitted without them? Just wondering about the possibilities.

The short answer is "it depends". For instance if you post something, and another one of us happens to have the movie available we could cross check against that and post screenshots. Cross checking against web resources is also possible, although almost every resource varies in reliability (especially the various fanboy sites in English). The HK film archive (Webpac) may have some of this information (in Chinese), and we could check against that. Essentially, if you have something by all means just post it and see where it goes.

If you and others really get serious about this I will open up a new forum dedicated to the purpose of discussing soundtracks and their addition to the DB. I really think this would be a great addition to the DB.

[Brian Thibodeau]

Thanks for the info. I'll contribute what I can when I get a chance to look over some old notes. The idea of a forum sounds good too, as there's a lot of great music in these films beyond the sometimes-awful synth bleating and blatant stealing of scores from Italian and American soundtracks (hey, there's a whole topic unto itself!), and I'm probably not the only one here to have more than a few HK CDs lining my shelves (even if I don't always know what they're saying). Hong Kong pop, even when it ISN'T designed for use in the movies, just seems designed for use in the movies!

Cheers!