Localizing an animated pharmaceutical video with no source files

English to Latin American Spanish, rebuilt frame by frame.

The project

An animated brand video for a large pharmaceutical company had to be delivered in Latin American Spanish. The English original runs twelve minutes: a polished motion piece built around a cast of characters, with on-screen text running through nearly every scene. Name cards, lettering on props, hand-drawn titles, text built into the artwork itself.

The problem

There were no source files. No Premiere project, no After Effects composition, no layered artwork. Nothing but the finished, flattened video.

The standard route assumes those files exist: open the composition, swap the text layers, re-render. Without them, the usual answer is that the video has to be remade at the cost of the original production.

What I did

Rebuilt the piece in After Effects, using the exported video itself as the base layer. From there the work fell into four kinds of problem.

Character name cards

Each character is introduced on a coloured panel with the name wiping in on a diagonal. Every Spanish name is a different length from its English counterpart, so each card had to be re-lettered and re-fitted, entering and settling on exactly the same frames as the original so the sequence still cut to the music.

Lettering drawn onto objects in the scene

The closing storybook carries a hand-lettered ribbon rather than a text layer, on a page that opens and turns in three dimensions. The English sets over three lines; the Spanish is longer and breaks differently, so the banner had to be re-lettered line by line, matched to the original hand, and tracked to the page as it moved. It was drawn, not set.

Frames where animation crossed the text

Where a hand or a character passed in front of or behind on-screen text, the scene was exported frame by frame so the replacement could be composited underneath the moving element rather than floating on top of it. This is the slow part, and it is the part that separates a rebuild from a patch.

Text baked into the artwork

In places the English lettering was part of the illustration, not a layer above it. Those frames were reconstructed in Photoshop: the original text removed, the artwork underneath rebuilt, and the Spanish drawn back in.

Then the whole thing was retimed. Spanish runs longer than English, and the copy had to read comfortably without altering a single cut.

Those four categories describe the shape of the work rather than the size of it. Across twelve minutes there were dozens of separate animated text elements, each needing its own solution. The storybook spread described above is one of the more straightforward ones. The hardest were the scenes where lettering was moving, partly hidden, and drawn into the artwork all at once.

The names were transcreated, not translated

Worth pulling out, because it is the part people assume is automatic.

Trey became Tito. Trina became Tere. Cybark, the robot dog, became Perrobot.

None of those is a translation. Each one is a new name chosen to keep what the original was doing: the same opening sound, a similar length, the same register, and above all a name a Spanish-speaking child would recognise as a name rather than as a foreign word. Cybark is a pun, and puns do not survive the journey, so it was rebuilt as one that lands the same way in Spanish.

The invented place name, on the other hand, stayed exactly as it was. It belongs to the world rather than to a language, and it reads the same way to both audiences. Knowing which names to recast and which to leave alone is a judgement call, and getting it wrong in either direction is obvious to the audience and invisible to everyone else.

Every one of those decisions then has a typesetting consequence. A shorter name changes the optical centring of a card. A longer one changes where a line breaks on a curved banner. The linguistic choice and the layout are the same problem.

The result

Twelve minutes of Spanish that matched the English frame for frame, delivered without the client ever having to locate, recreate or pay for the original project files.

Why it matters

This is the kind of job that comes back from other vendors. Most localization workflows assume the source files exist, and often they do not: the agency has closed, the freelancer has moved on, or nobody archived the project. Knowing how to rebuild rather than refuse is the difference between “this cannot be localized” and a delivered file.