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 Trikafta, a Vertex Pharmaceuticals therapy, had to be delivered in Spanish for Latin American audiences. The English original was a polished motion piece with animated text running through nearly every scene.

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 localization route for animated video assumes those files exist: you open the composition, swap the text layers, adjust for the new language’s length, and re-render. None of that was available. The usual answer at this point is that the video has to be remade from scratch, at the cost of the original production.

What I did

• Rebuilt the piece in After Effects, working from the exported video as the base
• Re-created every animated text entrance by hand — matching the original timing, easing and motion so the Spanish version moved identically to the English
• Exported individual scenes frame by frame where animation sat in front of or behind moving elements, so the replaced text could be composited cleanly
• Reconstructed the more complex frames in Photoshop, where on-screen text had been baked into artwork and had to be removed and rebuilt underneath
• Retimed the Spanish copy, which ran longer than the English, so it read comfortably without altering the cut

The result

A Spanish version 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. Very often they do not: the agency that made the video has closed, the freelancer has moved on, or the project was simply never archived.

Knowing how to rebuild rather than refuse is the difference between “this cannot be localized” and a delivered file.