A large pharmaceutical company needed its animated brand video in Latin American Spanish. The problem was that nobody had the project files anymore.
The Project
The English video runs about twelve minutes and follows a cast of animated characters. There’s on-screen text in nearly every scene, including name cards, lettering on props, hand-drawn titles and text that’s part of the artwork itself.
Normally you’d open the After Effects or Premiere project, swap the text layers and render it again. In this case there was no project file and no layered artwork, only the finished video. When that happens, clients are usually told the video has to be remade from scratch.
What I Did
I rebuilt the video in After Effects, using the finished English video as the bottom layer, and then dealt with each piece of text. It mostly came down to four kinds of work.
Character Name Cards
Each character is introduced with their name wiping onto a coloured panel. The Spanish names are different lengths from the English ones, so I re-lettered every card and timed it to start and stop on the same frames as the original, so the sequence still matches the music.
Lettering on Objects in the Scene
The closing scene has a storybook with a hand-lettered ribbon on a page that turns in 3D. The Spanish was longer than the English and broke onto different lines, so I re-lettered it by hand to match the original style and tracked it to the page as it moved.
Animation Passing Over the Text
Where a hand or a character moved in front of the text, I exported those scenes frame by frame so the Spanish could sit underneath the moving element instead of floating on top of it. This was the slowest part of the job.
Text Built into the Artwork
In some scenes the English lettering was part of the illustration itself. I rebuilt those frames in Photoshop, removing the English, restoring the artwork underneath and drawing the Spanish back in.
Once everything was in place, I retimed the text so the longer Spanish could be read comfortably without changing any of the cuts. Across the twelve minutes there were dozens of separate pieces of animated text, and each one needed its own approach.
Translating the Names
The character names were adapted for Spanish-speaking children rather than translated. Trey became Tito, Trina became Tere, and Cybark the robot dog became Perrobot, which keeps the pun working in Spanish. The made-up name of the place they live stayed the same, since it reads the same way in both languages.
Each of those choices affected the typesetting too. A shorter name changes how a card is centred, and a longer one changes where a line breaks on a curved ribbon.
The Result
The client got twelve minutes of Spanish video that matched the English frame for frame, without having to find, recreate or pay for the original project files.
If you have a video, a document or any other file that’s missing its source, feel free to get in touch. It can usually still be done.
