For the end of our senior year at Freestyle, we were given the chance to do essentially anything we wanted to do as our last project (as long as it was related to our class). The point of the project was to have one last opportunity to make something unique and that shows our skills that we have learned. The name of the project, Zenith, meaning the time at which something is most powerful of successful, really fits the idea of the project where we are supposed to give it our all for our last project.
My Zenith project idea was all about audio dubbing and translation. I planned to shoot a short scene in English, and then dub it over in Spanish, using voice actors to help me out with the dubbing. I’ve wanted to try something like this for a while, mostly because I’ve been surrounded by multiple languages my whole life, and have consistently consumed media in multiple languages. I’ve always noticed that the dubs and translations for certain shows and movies tend to be off in my opinion, so I wanted to try it myself.
I’ve never tried anything like this, and also haven’t really done much translation work, so this was mostly a new experience for me. I also hadn’t worked with voice actors before, so that was something that I had to figure out, especially with the timing of the lines. We haven’t done much of captioning or dubbing in class, so this was all new territory.
Process
I started off with writing and setting up the scene I was gonna shoot. I wrote a few lines that had things like idioms or phrases that might be a little more tricky to translate.
After that, I went out and filmed the scene (which didn’t take too long), with special attention to how much mouth movement I capture, to make my life easier editing.
Once the scene was filmed, I went back and slightly modified the translations, as the lines weren’t one to one as I wrote them. I then went and recorded the Spanish version of the lines with a couple ‘voice actors’. Unfortunately, since I wasn’t super diligent about getting the correct timing on their lines, most of them ended up being too long for the time span. With no time left, I ended up recording all of them myself, which didn’t come out amazing, but overall the video wasn’t bad.
We then went and did a presentation showing off what we did.