[Behind-the-Scenes] HELIOS Rising Heroes: Animation Showcase
âHELIOS Rising Heroes: Animation Showcaseâ is an English voice fan project I worked on all by myself (barring voice actors) that took five months to make.
The original plan was to make just one video, but it ended up being eighteen of them!
Link to YouTube playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0UbdFyWSx0n_ewcd-t0iAB0adGe5lghH
In this write-up, Iâll be discussing details about the response to the project, recording all the footage, video editing, voice acting + audio processing, script translations + rewriting, which fonts were used, and even the emulator used. Iâve organized it into sections to make it easier to find certain things. Also, this is directed to English-speaking readers since Iâm not gonna bother translating the entire thing to Japanese.
THE DREAM
I wanted to make this fandub ever since the game was released (in Aug 2020). I just knew that English voices would be extremely fitting to the world of HELIOS with a setting inspired by America and characters, places, and terms mostly in English. I was disappointed to hear that the studio behind the game, Cacalia Studio of Happy Elements K.K., had no interest to localize their games outside of Asia, which meant the chances of an English dub, let alone a global release were close to zero.
I was able to understand how to play the game thanks to the fan translators, some of which came from other Cacalia Studio games, and got inspired to continue learning Japanese (there was a previous attempt to translate Japanese lyrics years back).
What I thought was just the silly dream of one overseas playerâs became something much more!
THE TIMELINE (BRIEF OVERVIEW)
I played the game for about two months prior to working on the project. Before starting the project, I had to sort out graphical and technical issues on my end first as I was unable to play the game smoothly until November.
November 2020
Finding all the in-game battle lines
Writing transliterations (romaji) of lines by ear
Learning and translating lines to Japanese
Started recording footage
December 2020
Further translation revisions
Held a casting call
Script rewriting and finalizing
January 2021
Completed casting
Started video editing (learning process)
Started audio processing
Recorded more footage
February 2021
Recorded more footage
Japanese script revisions
Finished working with VAs
Finished audio processing
Continued video editing
Published Preview video
March 2021
Recorded the last of the footage
Japanese subtitle revisions
Finished Showcase video
Finished Individual battle clips
Gave recommendations to VAs
The exact start and end dates were Nov 1st, 2020 to March 31st, 2021. Pretty neat.
RESPONSE TO THE PROJECT
I was absolutely shocked with the response to the preview video, which at the time of writing has just hit 10K views and almost 600 likes on Twitter and YouTube combined. Not bad for an unpaid hobby fandub (a joke only I find funny...) of an otherwise ânicheâ Japanese-only mobile game.
As of Apr 4th, 2021 - Thank you so much. This is more than I couldâve asked for.
The preview video blew up way more than anticipated, setting up for a bit of disappointment when the Showcase video was released.
The amount of views I expected for this project within its prime were a couple hundred views, so Iâm content that the Showcase video reached that amount (it had ~500 by the end of March).
The expectations for the battle clips were an average of 100 views and a handful of likes - and each one got roughly that amount (or more) - so Iâm also content with that, especially for something thatâs just âbonus materialâ.
I tried my best to promote this project on Twitter with three main tweets. My one regret with promoting the project was making the second tweet after publishing the Showcase because the Japanese I wrote there was pretty terrible (as I was all worn out from editing and was in a haste to tweet about it). I tried to make up for it in a follow-up reply the next day, but it was too late. I was satisfied with how my third and final tweet and thread of battle clips turned out, but it sadly didnât garner much attention. A reason for this was probably due to bad timing. I knew that the timing of the last tweet was awful as HeliosR did something special for April Foolsâ day, plus the Easter event was being hyped around the same time, but I really wanted to finish up the project within March (my timezone, at least. It was already April 1st in Japan).
It was important to also make the videos accessible to the Japanese audience as they were a large portion of the viewers. This proved to be a challenge as my knowledge of Japanese is limited - at least for me, itâs easier to translate grammar-correct Japanese than it is to write my own sentences.
I ultimately decided against posting any of the videos on NicoNico because I wasnât sure about Japanâs laws regarding copyrighted material. I knew it was already risky enough posting on social media and didnât want to take any additional risks.
ABOUT THE FOOTAGE (1) â HEROES & ATTACK ORDER
HeliosR uses a gacha system, so to be able to even make something like this, youâd first need access to all 16 â 4 OG Heroes in the game.
I had them spread across five different accounts, four of which were reroll accounts. Asakou from the Cacalia RPG server gave me two of those accounts, and I rerolled myself for Keith and Ren during their Birthday Orders (one free 10-pull per account). Every account is also given a free â 4 selector ticket which I made good use of.
3,000 rubies (in-game currency) were sacrificed to pity the â 4 OG Dino when he was released in December just for the sake of the fandub!
Besides covering all of the Heroes, I also needed to play through each account to unlock certain story chapters, event stages, and evolve the Heroes for their shiny evolved CG art. Some of the Expert event stages (that had the Nighttime backgrounds) proved difficult to clear with a new account.
When using skills, the order of the Heroes were edited such that everyone was able to have the majority of their lines used at least once. All Heroes had two âreceiving supportâ lines, two or three âsupportingâ lines, and two or three âskills against the enemyâ lines. Some of the extra lines didnât make it into the Showcase, so they were used for the individual clips instead.
I shouldâve used Gray instead of Marion for the account that had Billy because you can see Marionâs sprite in Billyâs image. xD
In the Showcase, you may notice that the "Union Attacks" consist of all the â 4 CG images. These were spliced together; I never had all four Heroes of the same sector on the same account. For example, I would have Gray, Asch, and Jay on one account and Billy on another account, recorded their â 4 Bursts separately using the same background (from unlocking the Expert stages on both accounts), and then edited all the footage together.
Jayâs Burst was later re-recorded with a different attacking order so that he wouldnât link to Billy.
It was also important to keep the same order of Bursts as well as use all four Bursts in the same turn. The â 4 Burst order was usually determined by who didnât link skill with one another (with the exception of East sector as I was still figuring things out) because I didnât want the link skill activation getting in the way of the animations.
As a little bonus, I also showed off the exclusive damaging skills of the Chapter 6 and 7 â 4 frames that I was lucky enough to pull from the gacha: Marionâs "Invitation To The Danceâ (roses), Faithâs âSynthetic Vibesâ (beats), and Dinoâs âCrow Mark Dead Endâ (claw marks).
ABOUT THE FOOTAGE (2) - BACKGROUNDS
Since I didnât want to use the same battle music and backgrounds for all of the videos, I decided to use some of the themes from the limited-time events which went as far back as Nov 2020.
Each background has three variants (Daytime, Afternoon, Nighttime) and so I carefully picked them based on the colours. I ended up using mostly Expert stages - or Nighttime backgrounds, since Daytime versions were only used for Normal difficulty stages (which are too easy to clear).
The backgrounds used for the Showcase, all from limited-time events.
I decided to mix up some of the Heroes from other sectors in the individual clips for fun, basing it off of their relationships with each other. Using South sectorâs background for Gastâs clip was a purposeful choice because I already used the North sectorâs background for the other three North sector Heroes. I made sure to include Akira and Will of the South sector in Gastâs clip so it didnât feel too random!
The only default background I didnât use was Chapter 2âs because I already made use of the Casino theme for OG West sectorâs individual clips. (...Plus I didnât really like that background :p)
Hereâs a list of all the backgrounds I used:
Escape the Prison (Nov 2020) - used for Showcase [EAST]
Mission of CASINO (Nov 2020) - used for Junior, Faith, & Keith clips
HAPPY NEW YEAR SHOW! (Jan 2021) - used for Showcase [SOUTH]
Help! Cooking Hero! (Jan 2021) - used for Will and Oscar clips
A Sweet Spell Garnished With Chocolate (Feb 2021) - used for Showcase [WEST]
Grandiose Chinoiserie (Mar 2021) - used for Showcase [NORTH]
The Hero Is A Detective!? (Mar 2021) - used for Billy and Jay clips
Default backgrounds: Chapters 1, 3, 4 (shared with 7), 5 (shared with 6) - used for all other clips
The Christmas event was the only event that went unused during the Nov 2020 - Mar 2021 period.
I didnât record the East sector event (Christmas) in Dec 2020 because I was actually too busy with the casting call! I also didnât think I would make use of it after already recording the Prison event intended for East sector. The project ended up taking so long that it actually benefited from having a wider selection of events over the months, which also showcased the beauty of the game.
ABOUT THE WORK & VIDEO EDITING
Hardware:
A decent computer.
A pair of no-name earbuds I found while cleaning out some junk.
Software:
All FREE!
*Thereâs a catch
NoxPlayer* emulator (debloated, read more about in its own section) and Open Broadcast Studio were used to record game footage and sounds.
Davinci Resolve was the main tool I used to edit the videos. A very demanding program that I only recommend using if you have a mid to high end computer.
MediBang was used to edit some of the art like the logos, but I ended up using Resolve for the majority of the graphics, including the thumbnails.
Audacity and Cakewalk were used to edit audio.
Many aspects for this project took longer than I had hoped because there was a learning process with using Resolve for the first time. Iâm also a bit of a perfectionist, re-exporting videos tons of times just to fix small mistakes. Lastly, the time it took to make all the fancy effects was longer than Iâd estimated. As the project dragged on, there was pressure to not delay the release of the videos any longer than I had to. A lot of this was self-imposed though.
There were days where I just did something else other than work on the project, which helped re-fuel my motivation when I decided to pick it up again.
Pretty much everything in the videos were taken from the game itself. The only graphics that were taken from the official website instead were the Substance symbols (the pictures with HERO at the bottom).
Additional overlay graphics were custom-made. It took two whole days to make the 3-second long sector intros and another two days to create and animate the arrow graphics for the credits. These were made using Resolveâs fusion and colour features. Much of the edit was inspired by the official HeliosR designs.
Left: Official in-game graphics // Right: My fanmade video (sector intros)
Sector intros were inspired by the four Heroes version of Union Attacks in-game.
Left: Official HeliosR video // Right: My fanmade video
The Preview video took after the â 4 Burst mini-previews as part of HeliosRâs promotional campaign, uploaded before the game was released.
Left: Official HeliosR video // Right: My fanmade video
The credits at the end of the Showcase were inspired by a different video, this time being the Half-Anniversary video.
The Showcase - which had a duration of 29:07 - was 11.5GB large in size. It took almost three hours to render (which I re-rendered to fix things) and two DAYS to upload to YouTube because I experienced multiple uploading interruptions. Itâs a good thing you can re-upload the same video to continue where you left off without having to restart the entire process.
The individual hero clips didnât take as long to make (but they took a while anyway as I re-uploaded some of them to fix minor mistakes). The recommendations for the VAs that were given alongside the publishing of each clip also spanned over another five days as I wanted to personalize and think about each one carefully.
A pretty frustrating part of the project was the prevalent lag when recording footage, which may have been due to the emulator and/or some technical things on my end. The Prison event used for the Showcase was the very first one I recorded when I wasnât as aware about the lag, and so it suffered a bit as a result. The Union Attacks were the worst offender. I re-recorded the same battle scenes several times each just in case, then went through the footage frame-by-frame in Resolve and chose the ones with the least amount of lag. If all of the recorded footage suffered lag at different parts, I would even compare and splice together parts of them that didnât lag. There was also audio lag (a known issue of NoxPlayer) so I had to move all of the audio forward by 1/3 of a second.
By the end of the project I had over 200 videos of game footage with a total size of over 24GB and a total duration exceeding 9 hours, not even counting all the ones that went unused.
The Heroes werenât the only ones who evolved. MS Paint not recommended for thumbnails.
Overall, (despite the few mistakes here and there that nobody other than me would notice) I was happy with how everything turned out, down to the gorgeous thumbnails! I am an artist, after all~ :^)
I also have much more respect for video editors. They should be called VIDEO ANIMATORS!
ABOUT THE VOICES & AUDIO PROCESSING
When making a dub, it doesnât mean we want to replace or best the original language, we just want to give it a new interpretation. In fact, the charactersâ voice descriptions and direction provided in the scripts were heavily inspired by the seiyuu (Japanese VAs) and how they performed their lines.
Honestly, this was THE dream cast!! Some of the VAs had comparably similar voices to the Japanese ones which was an amazing coincidence. The ones that may not have sounded as similar had unique interpretations that I felt still suited their characters well. I also chose actors based on their performance, and everyone delivered!
Voice actors were not expected to imitate the Japanese voices and lines. They were provided direction and reference videos to help time their lines, but were otherwise given liberty when it came to their own interpretations.
You shouldnât hear any jarring differences between the voice actorsâ microphones and setups. Thatâs because I took the time to process the audio. Faithâs audio was submitted to me post-processed so it was used as a guideline for what the audio quality should sound like. Some of the others had comparable quality to Faithâs, so I only added compression to balance their volumes. Most of them benefited from equalization of various levels - this took some experimenting back and forth with the frequency spectrum. Lastly, a couple more benefited from clip fixing, noise gate, de-essing and/or click removal. It was very important for VAs to have at least decent room treatment; while small differences between mic frequencies can always be altered, echoes are difficult if not impossible to remove completely.
I feel that audio engineering is highly underrated and more important than ever as voice actors continue to record from home studios.
And in case it wasnât already clear, this was purely voluntary work. No VAs or myself were paid to contribute anything for the project. Though, the experience alone was worth more than any amount of money.
ABOUT THE SCRIPT & TRANSLATIONS
HELIOS Rising Heroesăă¨ăŞăŞăšRăEnglish Translation - Battle Lines
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ImWrAfvS_hgp6qr5qt30vCP63uHEk2o79uqY0h-3wL4/edit?usp=sharing
This spreadsheet consists of the literal translations for all the battle lines I could find in the game (it still isnât done -yet-, plan to finish it when I get the chance). These are only fanmade and are not guaranteed to be accurate, especially as I wasnât able to find another translator to help or proofread it.
After translating the lines, I made many additional revisions from the literal meanings such as changing the intention of the line slightly to flow better, having extra words added in to provide more context, or changing them completely. Thus, the lines used in the video are NOT literal TLs!
Another thing of note that may not seem apparent, but is what I feel an important aspect of character writing, is to remain completely unbiased towards all the characters. Personal favourites aside, I ensured that every Hero had their own spotlight as well as lines written in a way that remained faithful to their personality, no matter how unlikeable they were (looking at you, Asch Albright).
Even after giving voice actors their scripts, I made another revision in February after the release of the aforementioned Half-Anniversary video with the transcriptions for the â 4 Bursts, which is when I discovered a couple of mistakes with my transcriptions. This resulted in me having to edit out a part of one of the voice actorsâ lines (Billyâs âString Showâ line in his â 4 Burst) because of a translation mistake! Iâm really glad I was able to double-check the correct lines before releasing the Preview video, or it wouldâve looked pretty silly to Japanese viewers.
The last set of revisions were just minor edits to the subtitles (such as using kanji instead of kana) while I was working on subtitling all the videos.
Notable changes included:
WILL SPROUT
During attacking combo
Original line:
tanonda zo... ike! / âCounting on you... Reach!â
Rewritten line:
âIâll become stronger... For everyone!â
The rewritten line is a condensed version of one of Willâs â 4 Evolved CG lines (âFor everyone... Iâll become more and more stronger!â). He had âReach!â in both his attacking combo and regular Burst, so I gave him an extra unique line.
â 4 Burst
Original line:
warui kedo... kore de oshimai da! / âSorry, but... it ends with this!â
Rewritten line:
âIâm sorry, but... itâs over for you! HAAAH!â
There were a couple of oversights I made with the script, and this was one of them that didnât fit the animation properly. Props to Ryan for coming up with the extra shout at the end! So yeah, we kinda winged this line.
OSCAR BALE
When using skills against the enemy, during attacking combo, and in the â 4 Burst (repeat line)
Original line:
osoi! / âSlow!â
Rewritten lines:
âToo slow!â / âYouâre slow!â / âOver here!â
Rewritten simply because I wanted to minimize repeated lines and change things up.
GAST ADLER
When supporting an ally, and during attacking combo
Original lines:
tetsudau ze / âIâll help (you).â
itchouagari / âAll done.â
Rewritten lines:
âIâve got your six.â
âTarget eliminated.â
I wanted to add in a few military terms to reflect Gastâs background.
FAITH BEAMS
â 4 CG line (for the credits)
Original line (literal TL):
âItâs not terrible or evil, right? Surely this isnât punishing... I guess?â
Rewritten line (with âmistakeâ):
âIâm not doing anything horrible or evil, alright? This is just business as usual... I suppose?â
Faithâs CG line had a mistake when I first translated and handed it off to his actor. I accidentally wrote âoshigotoâ (work/business) instead of âoshiokiâ (punishment). The original has him pretty much saying the same thing twice anyway, so I would say the intention was still retained.
KEITH MAX
When supporting an ally
Original line:
gambare yo~ / âDo your best~.â or âHang in there~.â
Rewritten line:
âStay alive, would ya~?â
I know Keithâs meant to say âseriousâ things in a sarcastic or snarky way, but I just had to add in this fun line!
DINO ALBANI
Using skills against the enemy
Original lines:
haa! / âHaah!â
hei! / âHey!â
Rewritten lines:
âI can do this!â
âLeave it to me!â
The Japanese lines for Dinoâs offensive skills were rather basic, with the third and unchanged line âHere goes!â being a repeat line Dino also says when attacking. I wanted to give him some more lines - as standard as they are - to show his personality a bit more, along with having an additional fun West sector interaction. The changes fit the animations better too. (I actually had his VA say the "Haah!" line, but ended up using a different take of âHere goes!â in place of it.)
ABOUT THE FONTS
Fonts were taken from various sources and were either FREE for personal use or had an open font license. I didnât have access to the commercial fonts (such as Futura) used in-game, so these were the following fonts I made use of:
Techna Sans looked similar enough to Futura when capitalized, and still looked decent in lowercase.
Jost* is a font that was derived from Futura. Some of its uppercase letters are sharper than Futura's, but it worked pretty well for the text in the credits.
Gau Font Over Drive was used for the ANIMATION SHOWCASE text.
Gen Jyuu Gothic LP was used for the majority of the Japanese text and its English letters were also used for the battle clip subtitles on Twitter.
Meiryo UI (default font) was used for the Preview videosâ subtitles.
Noto Serif JP (default Google font) was used for the serif Japanese text in the credits.
ABOUT NOXPLAYER ANDROID EMULATOR
ETA: AS OF VERSION 1.1.18 (04/23/21), EMULATORS NO LONGER WORK WITH HELIOSR (AS WELL AS OTHER CACALIA STUDIO GAMES). THE BELOW INFORMATION IS OUTDATED.
If, for whatever reason youâre interested in using NoxPlayer, you should take caution when installing it onto your machine. I donât advocate for or recommend installing Nox. I had to resort to emulation so that I could record the footage and sounds directly from my computer using OBS. The reason why I used Nox specifically is because Cacalia Studio doesnât like emulators, blocking most of them from running their games. I found further instructions on how to run the game in Nox from the Cacalia RPG Discord (via Twitter @HeliosR_en).
First, not all Nox versions are safe. It should only be installed from the official website, Bignox. More recent versions (I believe from 6.3.0.6 and up) may contain malware such as Segurazo and Chromium packaged with the installer which can be annoying to remove. The version of Nox I used was 6.3.0.0 (you can install older versions, then just donât update it), which has Android 7 and doesnât contain packaged malware (AFAIK).
Second, NoxPlayer may be âfreeâ to use, but it comes with bloatware and profits off of its usersâ data by collecting and sending it to many different servers. The below guide is what I used to debloat Nox and minimize communication to these servers. Scroll down the comments for additional domains to add to the hosts file.
Debloating & Optimizing Nox:
https://gist.github.com/Log1x/12d330ef7685d6fbc611d1d57efb5c29
This is another good guide that makes use of command prompt to remove additional bloatware from the emulator.
How to Remove Bloatware on Nox and LDPlayer Emulator:
https://codefaq.org/emulator/how-to-remove-bloatware-on-nox-and-ldplayer-emulator/
ENDING NOTES (TL;DR)
Images of the first and last video for the HeliosR project. Weâve come full circle!
One very tired and average person decided to translate, script, cast, direct, and edit an ambitious project all by herself using only FREE tools, and ended up taking too long to finish it. But at least she finished it, right?
Translators = RESPECT
Voice actors = RESPECT
Video editors = RESPECT
Audio engineers = R E S P E C T (their work is especially behind-the-scenes)
Hell, I even like Asch now.
During my time working on this, there was one question I always had in mind: âWhat would the fans want?â
I hope this follow-up has given you a bit of insight into the makings of the HeliosR project. Thank you for reading!
~RubyJCat
