long afloat on shipless oceans

It's just a video of the intro I recorded with Retroarch, then because kdenlive isn't great with text, created the subtitles on Gimp using the BestTen font from FlopDesign and did some masking to simulate the character by character effect. It's way too fast, but it's also a situation I'd need it to be better with text for me put more effort in.

The script, in case you want to translate it back:

2101年に 戦争が始まっていた 主将：何が起こる。 整備士：誰かが爆弾を据え付ける。 交換手：受信状態は良好。 主将：何! 交換手：主要スクリーンを興奮する。 主将：貴方だ!! 猫達：殿方はお元気ですか!! 猫達：あなたの基地はすべて我らの物です。 猫達：あなたは破壊の道を歩んでいる。 主将：何を話す!! 猫達：生き残のチャンスはない自身の時間を作る。 猫達：葉葉葉葉。。。 交換手：主将! 主将：すべての「ZIG」を脱ぐ!! 主将：あなたは何をしているのか分かっている。 主将：「ZIG」を動かす!! 主将：大正へ。

Because it's me, I added some dumb jokes of my own:

"Main screen turn on" now is "arouse the main screen"

"It's you!" is "Anata da!", which is the same, but since it's kanji, the Captain is saying "It's darling!". Folks, I've given Zero Wing a Yaoi backstory.

CATS is "Nekotachi". The plural of cat. Also the dictionary tells me "neko" is a bottom, because the stars truly aligned.

"ha ha ha ha" is now "grass grass grass grass", because it reads the same. Dunno if it's that's why "LOL" in japanese is "草", or grass, because that's what happens if you put many 葉 (blades of grass) together.

"Take off every Zig" is now "Undress every Zig". Idk, something for ship fetishists as well. Or Tenchi Muyo.

I mostly did it because I wanted to get more acquainted with the tools after many years without doing anything, and since I'm running Fedora and I wish a very "please disappear" to Adobe, decided I'd use open source tools.

The process was simple, first identified each frame of animation each character had (39 total, I think), screencapped and vector-traced them using Krita, then used two different brushes for the outlines, one for all of the outlines and other bigger just on the thicker ones, and decided on a rougher pencil/ink look because I thought they would play better with this style of animation, then did the colouring using separate layers, before merging them all and exporting as if they were actual animation cells. Because I'm sure these were quick doodles that took the original artist far less time to draw than to me to redraw, ended up doing some cleanup because in HD some parts looked too "jumpy" or things like their hands going from 5 fingers to yakuza hands. Initially I was going to do some color texturing to give it a more hand-drawn look, but decided against it because 1) I needed a tablet because that sort of work with a mouse that isn't great is just pain 2) didn't want to sell something to buy one. Also thought of adding a noise layer or some film grain in place of that on post, but was not happy with the results.

Second part was creating the backgrounds and slides - The background is pretty basic, just a slight gradient, and I know they're copying a HyperCard program, so I searched a bit if I could find where one of those icons came out, but nothing matched so drew something close to the original. As for the cards, I know a few basics of japanese so (even if Krita does not like the kana/kanji input method I use) and while the bigger text was easy to figure out, a few of the smaller ones, even from cleaner transfers, were from educated guesswork and might be wrong and from searching for fansites for terms that could. Trying to figure out kanji for technical terms and pretend science isn't easy, you know. Decided to leave the "PPCIFIC" in there, it's easy for me to fix it if I want to later although I messed up that card and had to remake it (aaah etto bleh). Biggest deliberate change was deciding to give a chalkboard look to the last card because I feel that's what they were going for and it looks cute, don't @ me.

As I was moving along and doing each "cell" and card, I started sequencing the frames, a bit like a cell animator would with a camera: in Kdenlive (initially Shotcut, although I use it mostly to edit gifs), added a track for each character, the background and two for cards, sometimes using a draft just so I could feel progress in the work, and started to matching each character (they are named 00-00-00 depending on the "cell" of the character: kazumi-coach-noriko") to the same frame in the original, which I believe is completely accurate. During this process I noticed a few tiny mistakes and imperfections I fixed by deleting that area, and repeating the drawing process on a small rectangular "patch" to save time, an advantage of seamlessly being able to fix, save over the same file and just hit refresh on the file in Kdenlive). The card transitions, who have a different aspect ratio, are accurate in the way they start moving and slide out of frame at the same time, but it's just a position animation. The last thing to compose do was figuring out the fade out animation, a combination of two effects in Kdenlive that I've felt matched the original. Subtitles were really the last bit, added on Kdenlive and they're hardcoded here, but if I ever upload a dual-audio version or to a place that allows subtitle files, I can easily export a "clean" version, in higher quality too, although at 50-something% to fit under 100mb it looks pretty good already since it's very basic with little animation.