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rubyjcat · 1 year ago

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[Behind-the-Scenes] HELIOS Rising Heroes: Sing in the darkness - Animation Showcase

How I made the sequel to the HELIOS Rising Heroes: Animation Showcase English fandub project - titled "Sing in the darkness", and my final thoughts. It took longer than I had hoped as there were some struggles behind the scenes.

YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0UbdFyWSx0n_ewcd-t0iAB0adGe5lghH

Behind-the-Scenes for the previous fandub: https://rubyjcat.tumblr.com/post/647565364052574208/helios-rising-heroes-animation-showcase-behind-the-scene

Disclaimer: HELIOS Rising Heroes is the intellectual property of Happy Elements K.K and Cacalia Studio. This project is fanmade and does not represent Happy Elements K.K.

OVERVIEW

Timeline Scripts, Casting & Voice acting What I needed for this fandub Improvements from previous fandub Issues Miscellaneous Social Media & Reception Questions no one asked Final thoughts

TIMELINE

Early February: New Heroes were announced. I instantly knew I wanted to make a fandub sequel and scout voice actors! I started grinding four alt accounts (some from the previous fandub) to prepare to pull the new 4* Heroes from the gacha.

Late February: Sage and Nico became playable. I grabbed sample footage of their battle animations from the tutorial, translated their available battle lines and started re-writing the script and voice descriptions.

Late March to early April: Jude and Bianchi became playable. With the 12th Robins’ Quest Result line, I was able to finish Sage and Nico’s scripts and contact the VAs I had in mind for them. Grabbed & translated Jude and Bianchi’s battle lines and started re-writing their scripts and voice descriptions. Also grabbed sample in-game footage for the VAs’ reference.

Mid April to mid May: Held the casting call, reviewed auditions and the scripts during the time period. Grabbed footage from the “Rage Or Silence” stamp event for Jude’s individual clip. Started video editing. Made some last-minute script changes before casting Jude and Bianchi.

Late May to mid June: Sing in the darkness story chapter 3 (last part) was released. Grinded my alt accounts even more to be able to grab footage from the “Robber of Dawn” boss fight (the footage used was from the Sing in the darkness -link- Stamp event, although the boss was permanently added afterwards). Grabbed footage from a permanent stage for Sage’s individual clip. Lots of video editing.

Early to mid July: Started editing and adding VA lines I received. Grabbed footage from “Other Side Heroes -Good Morning-” event for Bianchi’s clip.

Took a break for about two months. During that time, HeliosR no longer worked on the emulator I used.

Late September: Despite no longer being able to emulate the game, I picked up the project again, started putting together parts I didn’t make yet such as the credits, and contacted the VAs who still owed me lines.

October: Was delighted to find out that HeliosR could be played on a a different version of Bluestacks. Recorded the “Castle of scary family!” event for Nico’s clip. I became more motivated as I received lines from the VAs. Made tons of revisions, additions, and finishing touches. I also did multiple quality checks for proportions of elements, volume of lines, subtitle text & timings.

November to early December: While waiting on retakes from one VA, I finished up the video editing, finalized social media descriptions, fixed last-minute mistakes, did further audio balancing checks, and learned how to make portrait-style videos for TikTok & YouTube shorts. I shared the videos to every social media platform I could think of. The plan was to release the individual Hero clips right after the boss battle video, but since it took longer than expected to upload the full video to YouTube (7 hours!) on top of having to make multiple shorts (had to manually edit the subtitles and the zoomed in parts to fit), I delayed the clips until the week after. It was much less stressful for me since I was able to prepare everything in advance!

SCRIPTS, CASTING & VOICE ACTING

English fan translation of battle lines: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ImWrAfvS_hgp6qr5qt30vCP63uHEk2o79uqY0h-3wL4/edit

Making the scripts was straightforward since I already had a fan translation spreadsheet made for the previous fandub and was familiar with the battle lines in-game. I recorded each battle line I found from the game, transcribed the Japanese lines by ear and translated them into English. Then I would rewrite some of them to fit the animations/mouth flaps better and/or for creativity points. I studied the characters' voices & personalities in-depth to provide accurate vocal direction as well. It was important to be faithful to the original Japanese version!

Me trying to figure out how to rewrite a line from Sage's regular burst. Also fun fact: Sage's "I'll show you!" and "Now's my chance!" during his counterattacks were extra lines I made up.

Sin, who I know from another project, and FPontaneles (a.k.a. TomatoVA), who auditioned for my previous casting call, were the ones I had in mind to voice Sage and Nico respectively, while I didn’t have anyone in mind for Jude and Bianchi prior to the casting call.

Tomato auditioned for the first HeliosR casting call! Looking through old auditions can be interesting.

I posted the casting call to both Casting Call Club and the Voice Acting Club discord with the deadline set a month away. In hopes of getting more visibility, I made sure to constantly update the deadline on CCC to keep the project closer to the top of search results.

Nico was up for auditions because Tomato didn’t respond. With the help of a fellow VA (Yan), he later responded to me in the middle of the casting call. I felt bad for those who auditioned already and closed the role early since I didn't want to waste anyone else's time.

Casting went smoothly since I was writing notes & shortlisting auditions in a document as I received them. I was worried about not being able to find suitable voices, so I was fortunate to have received a lot of good auditions! Rarely you'll find a standout who performs as if they were the character themselves, and that was the case with Brandon as Jude. Yan also surprised me with an audition for Bianchi since I didn’t think to invite him. I knew Yan since I voiced for his projects in the past, but he was chosen solely because of his fitting voice and potential.

The project was delayed significantly due to having to wait a long time for the VA lines (and retakes) that also affected my motivation. But I was determined to have this particular cast since not only did they sound great individually, they also sounded great together! These four voices put together sound like a harmony of sorts?! With some persistence, my patience paid off! It took so long, two of the VAs even had a handle/credit change during the time. For comparison, during the previous fandub, the longest I was in contact with a VA was 3 months, while in this one it took as long as 8 months!

WHAT I NEEDED FOR THIS FANDUB

A computer

Android Emulator: Bluestacks

Multiple accounts with the 4* OG 12th Robins Heroes

Recording software: OBS Studio

Video editing software: Davinci Resolve

Audio editing software: iZotope RX, Cakewalk by BandLab

Image editing software: MediBang Paint, Krita

Scripts in English

Voice actors who fit the characters

An outline of all the tasks to be done

A LOT of patience

And an audience - viewers like you!

IMPROVEMENTS FROM PREVIOUS FANDUB

(Some exceptions apply)

60 FPS cap > 30 FPS cap. Due to in-game lag and my shabby computer, footage would vary between ~30-60 FPS, but it was still better than the 30 FPS cap of the old videos. The anime part of bursts are limited to 30 FPS in-game. A few parts also capped at 30 FPS by mistake when I logged into a different account and forgot to adjust in-game settings from their defaults.

NVENC encoding > Software x264/AVC. Better and more consistent video quality during high-motion parts, at the cost of additional load on my GPU. Grabbing sample footage for the VAs' reference first proved useful as I reviewed it later and realised just how blurry it got at certain parts.

Don't use AVC quality (superfast). This is not even a JPEG.

2160p resolution > 1080p resolution in Bluestacks. Results in smoother line art quality when character sprites are far away, with an exception: I used 1080p for the bursts since 2160p made the backgrounds look strange - the colours were separated into chunks like MS Paint quality. However, since my computer resolution is limited to 1080p it probably wasn’t a big difference anyway.

Improved video edits. I learned how to use Fusion more effectively plus additional techniques such as the follower modifier for text, particles, static effects, and light leaks using a noise texture.

All of this just to make the first five seconds of the preview!

ISSUES

The process of grabbing in-game footage was another struggle. Lots of time was wasted from re-recording footage over and over due to:

Lots of lag. As stated in the previous section, footage varied between ~30-60 FPS. I re-recorded footage many times and then put together the parts that didn’t lag/glitch in certain spots. I wasn’t able to grab the Union Attack with 4* Jude without lag, so I had to edit Jude’s image into some of the missing frames manually. Also did lots of frame-by-frame editing and removing same frames that lagged for 3+ frames.

Lots of one-frame graphical glitches/artifacts. They occurred 50%-95% of the time depending on what I was trying to record. They did not go away even after adjusting NVIDIA settings and Bluestacks settings multiple times. I assumed it was due to the older Bluestacks version having issues and/or my computer’s graphics card being outdated and burnt out (it’s the same one used for the previous fandub). I left a few miscellaneous graphical glitches in the videos because why not?

One of the many one-frame glitches I would often encounter while playing. How… beautiful.

The background partially disappearing/turning white during the Union Attack. This happened during the Expert stage of the Robber of Dawn boss fight. The Normal stage still looked like something was missing but at least it wasn’t white, so I resorted to stitching parts of footage together.

The Union Attacks were one of the most laggy things in-game for my emulator and required a lot of re-records and stitching together to look right.

MISCELLANEOUS

Backgrounds/BGMs…

I planned to make this fandub before I knew if there would be any new backgrounds/BGMs to use. I didn’t want to reuse the same background/music for all videos. Good thing the release of the Sing in the darkness story chapters came with three new BGMs and a unique background - I was in awe when the final boss was revealed! I ended up not using the “normal boss” BGM because I didn’t like it much (and it didn’t come with a unique background anyway). I also anticipated upcoming events and used the ones I thought were fitting for the battle clips even if the 12th Robins were not involved in them.

Nico’s battle clip…

HeliosR no longer worked on the Bluestacks version I was using after the August 17th update. I did not think to grab all the proper footage in advance, thus I was missing footage for Nico’s clip. I thought I had to resort to using whatever test footage I had recorded previously. There was another option I tried, that is to record the game on my Android tablet, but my tablet wasn’t cut out to record (laggy, low quality, resolution was also different). I was definitely happy when I was able to play on a different version of Bluestacks again in October, and especially happy because one of my regrets was not recording the “Lock on the Lost Night” event’s background during May. The background got reused for “Castle of scary family!” in October so I definitely made use of that.

Getting the 4* Heroes…

I used my main account for the majority of footage (using 2* forms) and grinded four alt accounts - two of which I made use of in the previous fandub. I grinded each alt starting from February to get enough rubies to pull/pity for the characters in gacha, and then enough resources to make the characters strong enough for the Expert difficulty stages. I ended up with Sage 4* on the 1st account, Nico & Bianchi 4* on the 2nd, and Jude 4* on the 3rd (didn't need the 4th).

My four alt accounts before pulling on the gacha.

Lots of planning involved…

I used the nighttime version (Expert difficulty) of the backgrounds and also picked stages with a good variety of enemies. I ordered my team as Sage/Nico/Jude/Bianchi at all times for consistency. Sage and Bianchi were the leaders in the group so I always initiated an attacking turn with one of the two. During the skills phase, I planned which VA lines would play where, made sure each line would play at least once throughout the project and made sure I never used the same combination of lines twice.

SOCIAL MEDIA & RECEPTION

First of all, it should be noted that the sequel is a niche of an already niche project - this only had 4 Heroes compared to 16 in the previous fandub, the 12th Robins aren’t the most popular, and HeliosR is still a Japanese-only game. With that in mind, I was overall satisfied with the engagement it received on various social media.

YouTube - The main videos did well, although the views were a little low. It was a good idea to make shorts too - they got a handful of likes and comments scattered throughout them. Jude's 4* burst was the most popular! The good thing about YouTube is that the videos will be there long-term, so perhaps they'll get more views over time.

Look at those pretty thumbnails~

Twitter - The 1st post got only ~460 views even with the VAs supporting it. The 2nd post did better as the views shot up by ~1000%! However, I messed up by not posting the link to YouTube as the first direct comment under it which hurt the exposure to the YouTube version. I've also learned that quote retweets work, while replies to old threads don't. Good to know for future posts.

H.E. Fan Discord - We got some nice comments and likes from fans for sure!

TikTok - The clips did well. Each of them managed 200+ views but then became stale rather quickly. A few users liked multiple clips which was always nice to see. Bianchi's 4* burst was the most liked!

Instagram - A flop.

Nico Nico Douga - A flop. The preview did get 1 like though.

Tumblr - I was happy to see someone like five of the posts! Besides that, well, it’s a good place to post a bunch of text like this. xD

Some of the lovely comments and likes received! Thank you so much!! ❤

QUESTIONS NO ONE ASKED

Q: Why did you make this project?

A: It's been 3 years and HeliosR still remains a Japanese-only game. Although HappyEle's most popular work, Enstars, has seen an EN release last year, the chances of the less popular HeliosR getting one is closer to zero. This is my way of showing my love for HeliosR as an overseas fan. I also enjoy working with voice actors! They are some of the most friendliest, talented and hard-working people I've met. I'm able to learn from them to become a better person myself. Lastly, I wanted to show that English voice acting can be done well with proper direction!

Q: Will you be making more HeliosR videos?

A: Most likely no. 1. Do I wanna do it, or can I even do it? Making these videos is very time-consuming. Also, I can only make content for the 4* Hero cards I have in-game. 2. Do the VAs wanna do it? Some of them are too busy and/or no longer do fandubs, and I don't want to go through casting calls for this again. 3. As stated in the previous section, it's a niche project. To be honest, I don't think it's worthwhile to make any more of these.

Q: Will you be making any more content in general?

A: Not sure. HeliosR was the only thing I worked on for the last three years. I don’t have the same passion for anything else at the moment.

Q: What was your favourite part to edit?

A: There were lots of parts that turned out well! I love the follower modifier a lot since it made all the text flow smoothly. Light leaks are simple yet effective. I also liked the static effects for the preview video’s CGs and the Sing in the darkness logo (although it was a pain to edit, haha).

Q: What was your favourite line in the script?

A: “Who’s the weakling of the week?” in Jude’s regular Burst. The Japanese was a play on words (”yowai yatsu ni you wa nai”) which means “There’s no use for weaklings” (literal) and I wanted to retain some of that wordplay.

Q: Who are your favourite Hero(es)?

A: Gray and Sage! I for one am an extremely satisfied fan >///<

FINAL THOUGHTS

Years ago, I fulfilled my dream of a hypothetical English cast for the 13th Hero team from a beloved Japanese-only game. I’m happy to have finally made a sequel for the 12th Robins Heroes! Now it’s time to close this chapter.

I hope fans of HeliosR enjoy the Animation Showcase!

#エリオスライジングヒーローズ #エリオスr #helios rising heroes #heliosr #12th robins #sage skyfall #nico #jude ares #bianchi law #voice acting #english #fandub #fan #dub #EN #youtube

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