The Reasons for Graduations

Every time a H!P graduation is announced, I suddenly find myself surrounded by the same cynicism as the previous umpteen times. What really brought the issue home recently was Ogawa Saki's sudden graduation, and with the recent departure of Takahashi Ai from Morning Musume it has managed to remain somewhat topical.

What exactly is the issue? Graduations, and the motives behind them.

When Sakichi's graduation was first announced, within moments the fanbase was up in arms. It's moments of huge news like this when I love to check member threads on Hello! Online. To see an otherwise sleepy thread suddenly propelled to having two or three dozen people viewing the page at any given moment. News like this has even broken H!O in the past. If I recall, the site went down just after Ai's graduation was first announced as people rushed to confirm and discuss the news.

And so, upon informing my good friend Lone!Wolf of the news, he quickly stated the thing which I've always hated to acknowledge. "Seems it was her own decision," I retorted to his initial cries of anger. "Yeah. And Kanna was ill and Erika wanted to be a model," he sarcastically threw it back at me.

Ouch.

"I don't believe this UFA-created lie." He continued. "We don't know that she wrote it. It might be either UFA told her to say it, or said it for her."

Ouch again.

Such responses are all too common. As with some of the examples he used, when graduations are announced like this, suddenly people are quick to spin it. "Were they covering up a scandal?" "She's pregnant!" and so on.

This is rumour-mongering which, even now, I can't bring myself to permit. Some call it naiveté, but I have always operated by the belief that, if I trust my Idols, they'll never break that trust. They have no reason to lie about why they are leaving, just as I have no reason to doubt them. Does that make me foolish? I dunno. But it's a belief which is far more respectful to the girls themselves. 

I hold that the mistrust of UFA and the girls generated by these announcements is fueled, primarily, by a kind of selfish desire for the girls to never leave. We can't expect them to stick with it all purely for our sake and then lash out at them when they fail to live up to those expectations. Surely it's better that, when the girls feel that this is an industry which they just aren't cut out for, they make their peace and do something else with their lives? So that we can continue supporting her, and she can continue living as a normal girl, away from the stress of the entertainment business.

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The Difficulties of Fansubbing: Of Politics and Collaborations

This is something which I never understood before becoming a fansubber and, even as I type this, I'm not sure if you guys will understand it either. That said, it has been an integral part of my experience in this, and I want to write about it.

I think I may have already touched on my personal experiences of it in my previous two-part series on fansubbing, so I'll try not to repeat myself.

Inter-group Politics

I'm going to ignore internal politics as, for the most part, it isn't something I have come across. And what I could tell you of it I already did in the previous entry in this series. But politics between different groups seems to be more rife than one might initially believe.

It's something which is very common in anime fansubbing and manga scanlation. Groups will effectively fight over the more popular series. A show like Naruto or Bleach may have 3 or 4 groups all working to produce subtitles (although both those shows have been licensed, so there's no need for English fansubbers there, but that's another story for another time). Now, naturally you want people to download your work. There's no point in doing it if everyone ignores your release and goes to watch someone else's, right? Well, this creates an arms race of sorts, with groups usually splitting into two separate camps to ensure that they get the viewers they feel they deserve.

In the first camp you have your speedsubs. The goal here is simple. Be the first group to release, and everyone will download yours. And so these groups will do their best to ensure that their subs are out within the first 24 hours of airing. It's a legitimate, and mostly successful strategy.

But in the second camp you have quality subs. Not content to rush things and risk releasing poor quality translations, these groups opt instead to take their time and ensure that everything is of the quality you'd expect them to be when you sit down to watch your favourite show. These groups instead rely on the fact that a lot of people will be very conscious about the quality of their subs and will opt instead for the slower release. Also a legitimate and successful strategy.

And so the arms race created by this competition drives and motivates all parties to be the best at what they do, and ultimately cancel each other out. Both groups get stuck in this deadlock, and neither can win. Just like in the movie Wargames, the only way to win is not to play. And that's us, the audience. 

So, that's anime fansubbers... but what about Hello!Project?

Well, just like anime fansubbers, we like people to watch our subs. We still feel it was pointless if it reaches no-one because they all went off and grabbed someone else's. The biggest difference is that in anime there's an element of expectation in there. Competition is a fairly normal thing, because there are hundreds of groups out there, and so it makes sense if multiple groups end up doing the same thing. In Hello!Project, this isn't the case.

We generally only have a handful of major groups, and a few individuals working mostly on performances, at any given time. And so when the volume of potential new material to work on every week is much greater than the number of groups who can actually do them, there's an element of complacency in there, where you kind of assume that you're the only one working on it. And when this belief proves to be unfounded, it's all the more shocking.

Most H!P groups are more diplomatic than that. There's usually several lines of communication in place, where groups will inform others about the projects they plan to work on. This generally prevents any surprises further down the road. Of course, it still happens. I can think of three ICU projects that H!F did, despite the fact that ICU were publicly declaring their intention to work on them. 

It also happened fairly recently here at KIDS, though this time for lack of communication. TPF and KIDS both released subs of Airi's movie, Keitai Kanojo. We had started work on it immediately after release, and TPF approached us later saying that they were intending to release, and had already finished translating. They were just letting us know, and until that point, neither of us knew that the other was working on it. We hadn't bothered contacting TPF because, at that point, they were a new group (having only done 3 releases - with the releases they had done before those being at a rate of 2/year) and we simply had no idea who they were. And they were new to it all and so didn't think to let anyone know of their intentions early on. Basic mistakes for both of us. 

It made us very angry at the time though. They offered to collaborate with us on it, but, after a bit of discussion, we decided just to each release our own versions.

Collaborations

That brings me to my next topic, however. That of collabs, or joint-projects. It's something you see from time to time among the major groups these days. But, until a couple years ago, it was territory that was very much unknown. 

Some difference of opinion in how one Momoko DVD should be handled (ICU saying that, while we didn't want to commit to it, the commentary should be translated, and Hyakupa saying that they'd do it, but wouldn't do the commentary), both groups agreed to a compromise and it was decided that we would split the work between the two groups in the first ever joint-project by H!P fansub groups.

H!F and N!N (I think?) later did their own joint-project, which got released before ours (a recurring theme - the slowness of ICU releases, that is). But it was something we very much had to make up as we went along.

And, of course, both groups had very different ways of doing things. And so we found quickly that communication would be vital, and compromise would be essential.

That experience has meant that, although joint-projects are nothing unusual any more, KIDS refuse to do them. We still do collaborative efforts with other fansubbers, such as the work we did with H!F's snoboat on Sanokuen Shojo or with Kai_Guy01 on Keitai Kanojo. We insisted that it not be a joint project however, and instead that fansubber would come work for us as a special guest.

It may appear to just be semantics, but it allowed us to skirt around the politics and the difficulties of working a compromise between the two groups' styles and way of working by just using our own.

H!F have offered to do joint-projects with us several times, and this is the main reason why we have always declined.

So what are these complications in the way we do things?

Well, taking the ICU/Hyaku release as the example, it could be just about everything. From small things like fonts or ensuring consistent translation style, to the more political things. ICU were well-known for extreme use of editor's notes, and for their "translate everything" attitude, which Hyakupa were never too keen on. Hyakupa were well known for releasing their projects as upscales at 720p, which ICU was very much against - while ICU liked to do an XVID and H.264 encode and Hyaku only ever did the H.264. Hyakupa had a fairly over-the-top style of presenting their credits list, but insisted on including the whole staff, rather than just those who worked on a project whilst ICU's style was more understated and traditional.

The list goes on, but I'm sure you can now understand what makes joint-projects so much of a headache. All these issues had to be resolved, and it took a long time for all the agreements to be reached.

And so, I'll end this entry here. But be sure to check again next time for third part in this series. Building a brand.

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The Difficulties of Fansubbing: The Process

The simple act of fansubbing can be a long, drawn out process. I've been involved in this hobby since the second half of 2009. I had dabbled a little in it before then, but only a small bit as I subbed performances under the name Berryz Kyuuden Fansubs, and then when I joined Hello!Fansubs' trainee program. But it was from joining ICU-Subs in August 2009 that I really start counting myself as a fansubber.

And in this time, I've come to further appreciate just how complex the whole thing is, from the simple task of getting those translations to appear correctly on screen, to the difficulties in working with people you don't know, this is to be a short three or four part series on some of the complexities of the trade, as it were.

But, first up, I think I should explain to those who aren't familiar with how fansubs are created a little about the process itself. Other groups do things differently, and more on that in part two, but this is how things have worked in KIDS.

Getting Projects

The very first thing that any group does is decide what project to work on. This in itself can be fraught with hazard. When you are working as part of a group you have to be mindful of the other members in that group. This, of course isn't much of an issue when you are working solo, but not every member of your group may want to do the same things, and you try your best to make sure that you choose projects that everyone is eager to do, but there will always be cases where one or several members will say that they simply have no interest in doing a project.

How do you proceed? You have a project that you've been dying to work on, and when you let the others know about it, the translator says "That's too difficult" or "That's not a very good project". Do you make him do it anyway? Do you drop the idea - or at least sideline it? It has happened to me. I love stage plays, and they're the projects I most want to work on. But when I was in ICU, He-Hulk effectively filed the idea perpetually under "to be considered at a later date" and went on giving me projects which, for the most part, I did and enjoyed doing, but ones that were somewhat forced upon me when I hadn't gotten a chance to work on my own ideas.

Similarly, here at KIDS we haven't had much chance to do stage plays. Our translator, Lone!Wolf, isn't too fond of working on those kinds of projects, and the second translator we had in the past, CynicaltheCat, simply refused the suggestions due to difficulty and personal time constraints. It was only when we were approached by an external translator, snoboat, that I finally got my chance to work on one.

I don't blame them for being wary about such projects, and the limited opportunity isn't something that really annoys me, because there are other fun projects that we've done based on my recommendation. In every group there are ideas you love which never get done, and ones you weren't so fond of but you do anyway. Compromise is the basis for all human society.

One of the other major obstacles to overcome in beginning a new project is simply finding a raw to work from. Most of the time this is a fairly simple task and one which goes without any problems. But sometimes sourcing the video proves to be difficult, and there are several projects that we at KIDS have had on our list that we haven't been able to touch for this reason. One in particular has been on there since we started KIDS almost 12 months ago and we've been unable to secure a good high-quality raw for it. A high-quality one most likely doesn't even exist, as it was a TV rip from the early-to-mid 2000s, and at the time, rippers simply didn't think about how different the quality standards would be 5 or 10 years down the line.

Timing and Translating the Script

There are actually two ways of proceeding, once you have your files to work from. The way that seems to be more common among H!P fansubbers is to time the script, making sure that each line will appear and dissappear at the correct moments. But an alternative method is to go straight ahead and translate it, working the timings in later. Both are common methods, and I know that Hyakupa actually did a bit of both, but we generally opt for the first option.

Timing a script is a fairly simple task thanks to modern technology. Using more traditional methods, like the fansubs you might see on a bootleg anime VHS back in the 90s, were much more complicated and expensive. These days it's arguably the easiest job in the whole process.

Using a piece of subtitle editing software, such as the popular Aegisub, you simply match up the start and end of each line of dialogue with the audio, using the intuitive interface and functionality. The only real difficulties creep in when the project itself is difficult and requires intense focus and concentration. To use an example, a solo DVD like Momo-ONLY was a fun DVD and an easy one. You have only one person, and all of the dialogue spoken by that one person, it's easy to follow along, and you can time each line without much thought at all.

Now take an episode of Hello! Morning. Suddenly you can have 8 or 9 people at any given time and it becomes a lot more complicated. With it's fairly spontaneous unscripted nature, it's normal to have 4 or 5 girls all talking over eachother at once, and you have to listen very closely for the start and end of each line of dialogue in that mess - even more complex if your group colour-codes like ICU did!

And then comes the next stage, and the translator has to try make sense of all that mess. 

Where the timer just had to differentiate voices and say "Okay, she started talking here and stopped here," the translator has to say "Right, and this is what she said." It can be difficult to listen and understand 5 people all speaking at once in your native tongue, I'm sure you'll all agree. So now imagine trying to do it in a second, or even third language. Its an impressive feat by any means. There's a reason why many potential translators don't want to get tied down into working for a group like this. It puts quite a lot of pressure on you to keep delivering when, I'm sure, all you really want to do is enjoy it.

Editing and Typesetting

After the two stages in actually producing the script, comes the refinement phase. In KIDS, immediately after translation, script then comes back to me to be QC'ed. QC is short for Quality Control, and it's actual meaning differs slightly from group to group.

During this stage, I format the script. It's not really a necissary part of the job, and wasn't something I even did originally, but over time we have developed a presentation style unique to us, and I spend a great deal of time getting the script to match that. The more important parts of the task, however, is to simply check spelling and grammar, and to work with the translator to ensure that any liberties I take to make with the English script still convey the intended meaning from the Japanese. 

In an unscripted project, like a solo DVD, this can present a nightmare for us. The H!P girls use weird Japanese at the best of times. Couple this with the fact that they usually think as they talk, rather than thinking about what they want to say before opening their mouth, means everything is usually a mess of incomplete sentences, non-sequitors and non-words like "um..."

Typesetting follows up. This is another term that has varying meanings from group to group. In some groups, it refers almost exclusively to the choosing of fonts and colours and such - the typography of the script, if you will - and to the creation of special effects as 'scripting'. 

Here at KIDS, we simply merge these tasks together under the 'Typesetting' tag.

As stated above, the first part of Typesetting is to choose fonts and such. Thanks to the styles function of Aegisub, this is usually completed (for the dialogue, anyway) before the project has even been timed. So the real job is the onscreen text. Sometimes we'll have a project which doesn't have any of it and our Typesetter, Firren, will only have to code effects for the 'title screen' and staff list. And then there are times when we'll have hundreds of onscreen text to work through - all with varying levels of complexity. One might simply fade in and fade out, and one might explode onto the screen whilst rotating and then fade out. 

It's a long, arduous process of staring at the effects of the original, coding an effect to match it, and fine tuning and fine tuning until you are happy that the effects match the original onscreen.*

*If you'll excuse a little rant/tangent here, I feel compelled to point out one of our policies. We NEVER replace the original Japanese text with our own. I've seen a few groups make use of this technique where they felt they could get away with it, and I've always felt that this went against the grain of what fansubbers were. We add to the video. We make it understandable by people who don't speak Japanese. But by replacing the original text, you are changing rather than adding. This was something that Firren wanted to do when we first started out, and it's one of the only times in the history of the group that I've been stubborn - adamant, even - in my own point of view. 

Distribution

Typesetting is the last stage of the refinement process. After that, we're ready for release, and Firren begins encoding it.

Now, encoding is a fairly dull process which I don't fully understand anyway, so forgive me for kind of glazing over this stage, but I can only assume that it's a process that works similar to the Imp-Camera in the Discworld universe. 

Those software developers among you will know that the refinement phase actually continues on past this point in the Waterfall model. Once encoding is done, we test it by sitting and watching the completed video. If there are any mistakes that were missed in the initial QC, these are fixed and the file is re-encoded. 

The idea is that this is done as many times as necissary to ensure a mistake-free release. But some always sneak through. And the process can take so long that often if we do find mistakes we just debate on whether or not to release anyway if it's a fairly minor grammatical mistake (a missed apostrophe, for example), or to do another pass if it's a more major error.

Of course, there is one aspect to this phase which requires some thought. And that's how you want to package your subs. Hardsubs vs Softsubs. Both have their merits, but the one almost universally used by H!P fansubbers is the hard-encoded version (especially these days, where most people have a decent net connection, and the processing power of computers increases). In other fandoms, anime and dorama fansubs in particular, softsubs are often the preferred method, allowing for a faster release with no need to encode, as well as a faster download time as they download a file never more than a few dozen kilobytes. It does rely on them already having the video file themselves, but for people who downloaded or bought the raw straight away no longer have to grab the file a second time.

The biggest downside is that it doesn't offer anywhere near as much freedom on the kind of effects you are capable of. In hardsubs, it's possible to sub any onscreen text properly, and match the effects. In softsubs, the most effective way of doing it is simply to translate it in a note (either at the top or bottom of the screen), or to simply not translate it at all.

After this, the file is released, and provides perfect opportunity for us to sit back and enjoy a breather before completing (or, as the case may have it, beginning) the next project.

Which concludes my first post on this topic. Let me know what you think in the comments, and be sure to join me in my next post where I'll delve into the world of Collaborations and Politics.

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