The Content
In the past year of staying home and avoiding the dangers of the outside world, one comfort I spent hours upon hours upon with was Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons game. The creatures are all (mostly) cute and (mostly) friendly (so long as you’re nice to them in turn!), so I thought it would be a fun experiment to apply my skills to this 30-second Japanese ad for the game:
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a very popular game, and video sites such as YouTube are filled with skits, movies, and all-around fun edits made with a mix of its in-game engine and editing tools like Adobe Premiere Pro. I wanted to stand out with this personal project, so instead of working with splicing up a video in a similar vein, I thought it would be best to take the above ad and try my hand with flat-video localization.
The Challenge
Being a flat video, I had no extraneous content to use for localizing this ad. The official localization marketing team would have assets to help them with this process, such as the official file for the video to use for editing the text in the exact same locations and timings, etc. Doing a localization on a flat video includes a lot of extra steps.
The Process
First, I had to hide the Japanese text. Some of this process was very simple—the projector screen is all one color aside from the text, so I inserted rectangles of the same color and keyframed them to dynamically move over time to keep up with the words they were covering.
Getting rid of the rest of the text was not nearly so easy. I used masking and content-aware fill to do this, often making reference frames to help the process along. However, it was very difficult to do this successfully, and in the time I allotted to myself for this project, I wasn’t able to avoid the odd blurriness where the text used to be. Given more time, I may have tried to go frame-by-frame through these parts, although this isn’t really feasible for a general project, especially if the video needs a quick turnaround.
Next, I personally translated the Japanese text and found a suitable font to use for the English version. Manipulating the text was actually the most fun I had with this project, despite the somewhat shaky frames I had a few times. Using keyframes to dynamically animate the text layers was a blast, and it was very satisfying to get just right, such as during the zoom in section leading up to the reveal of the island getaway package frame.
Final Takeaways
For just a 30-second ad, there was a lot packed into it. I won’t underestimate a project based on the size of its original assets ever again!
Going into this project, I expected a lot more out of After Effect’s content-aware fill feature. I’ve seen how it can work with other videos, and I wonder if the dynamic camera and/or the computer-generated animation of the ad impacted the quality of its output.
You might be wondering: Why would you try localizing this Animal Crossing ad? After all, official localizations of this ad exist.
The answer is simple: It was fun to work with a series I enjoy, and it was a great chance to practice my skills. After all, flat-video localization could be used in a couple different scenarios, such as if an original project file is lost, or if it isn’t able to be retrieved at all. Videos with burned-in text are everywhere on the internet, and sometimes, subtitles just can’t cut it because they won’t be readable due to how much content there is on the screen.
You can see my final rendering of my project below. It’s by no means perfect, but all the same, I’m very happy with it considering the limitations of the technology and the original asset.
