Translating your video can also improve your SEO. The most popular keywords in English are difficult to rank for, but it’s often easier to climb the foreign language SEO rankings. In short, video translation can help you reach more people around the world. Let’s look at how to adapt your video to other languages.

Start by Translating the Video Transcript

Before we look at ways to adapt your video, you’ll need to translate your video transcript. First, check that your primary language transcript is error free. Any missed or misspelled words at this stage might be amplified in translation.

If you have someone in-house who is fluent in both languages, you can give it to them to translate. As an international company with a production studio in Argentina, we have a team of employees who are fluent in both English and Spanish. But many businesses don’t have these kinds of internal resources. In that case, you’ll need a third-party translation service.

Make sure your translator understands the voice and context of the video. A literal translation probably won’t be as compelling as an artful one. We’ve had success working with LanguageTran and StudioCenter with positive results in multiple languages.

If you use Google Translate or a similar automatic translator, be careful. Services like these use context words and phrases to choose the most probable translation, not the most natural one. So although the new text may be technically correct, it can sound clunky or awkward. This can make your video stand out for all the wrong reasons. As a best practice, try to seek out a native speaker to check your results.

Translating Your Video Using Subtitles

Subtitles are the easiest way to translate your video. They allow you to put captions at the bottom of the screen in any language without the expense of changing the audio. Subtitles can also increase viewership and engagement. Surveys show that 80% more people watch videos to completion when they have subtitles, possibly because people tend to watch mobile video with the sound off.

Some video hosting platforms have made adding subtitles easy by providing a captioning feature. On YouTube, you can upload your translated transcript and use that file to create captions. You can even set the timing of each line to control when it appears on screen. YouTube will automatically serve the captions that match the viewers preferred language, as long as you’ve provided a transcript in that language.

Ask your video provider for an .srt file. This subtitle file contains timecodes to mark the start and end of the text, to automatically apply the caption related to each timecode. 

Translating Your Video Using Voiceover

Replacing the voiceover makes your video more polished. Dubbing animation can be almost seamless. Things get a little trickier when you’re working with live action.  It takes more time and resources than subtitling but can make the viewer feel like the video was made for them rather than translated as an afterthought.

When replacing your voiceover with another language, it’s best to get a speaker fluent in that language. They know all the nuances and idioms that language learners may struggle to master.

Don’t forget to account for different dialects when hiring a voice actor. The Spanish spoken in Mexico differs from the Spanish spoken in Spain. So if you’re creating a video targeted toward the Mexican market, you want to hire a Mexican voice actor rather than a Spanish one.

Since different languages rarely translate word for word you may need to make some decisions about timing. Depending on the languages involved, the length might expand or contract, forcing the voiceover actor to speak too quickly or leave long pauses. Work with your actor to adjust speed and pacing.

Translating Your Video’s On-Screen Visuals

On-screen text presents special challenges. It’s more difficult and costly to replace than voiceover. The easiest and most cost-efficient answer is to provide subtitles.

Updating the artwork is more costly, but it’s worth the investment if you have the budget. It creates a much easier viewing experience. The animator will need to edit any frame where the text appears. If the original text was hand-lettered the original artist should be able to redraw the letters in any language that shares similar alphabets. If it is typed, the process is a little bit easier.

Take special care when translating to languages like Arabic, Chinese, or Russian. Because these languages use unique alphabets, it can be difficult to get the translation right. Drawing these characters requires cultural fluency that the artist won’t have unless they are intimately familiar with the language.

So What’s the Best Option for Translating Video Content?

Translating your script and creating subtitles is the least costly option. Many companies charge by the minute, with rates that vary depending on what language you’re translating to. Since , the recommended length of a marketing video is two minutes or less, a pay per minute translation will fit most budgets.

Replacing the voiceover is more expensive due to the added charge of casting a voice actor. It can get even more costly if you need to spend more time on lip-syncing, but if done well, your video will look more professional.

Replacing on-screen text is the most costly because it’s the most time consuming. It might be more effective to create a video specifically for that audience rather than repurposing an English language one.

For help creating videos that appeal to a global audience, contact IdeaRocket. Reaching international audiences isn’t just a talking point for us, it’s part of our DNA. Our founder grew up in Peru, the Dominican Republic ,and Australia. Today, we are proud of the work our Argentinian production team contributes as employee-owners of our. Contact IdeaRocket to start your international video project.

Receive our free eBook when you sign up for our newsletter!

Learn how to manage an animated video project for your organization:

• How to decide how much to spend
• Gaining buy-in from your organization
• Choosing a provider and style for your video
• Working with your stakeholders
• Working with the creative team
• How to calculate ROI on your video project
• How to promote your video
• Keeping metrics so you can learn

Get the
Free eBook!

The post How To Translate Video Content: A Tools and Tactics Guide appeared first on IdeaRocket.

Stereoscopy: Deception Of Depth Perception

Discovered in 1838 by Sir Charles Wheatstone, stereoscopy creates the illusion of three-dimensional depth using two-dimensional images. Stereoscopy takes two slightly different two-dimensional images and presents them separately to the left and right eye. These images are typically called stereograms, and with the help of a stereoscope, the brain accepts the images as one solid three-dimensional object. This combination of both images creates the perception of three-dimensional depth.

Stereoscopes use lenses that make each image on the stereogram appear larger and farther away than they are. To enhance the effect, a divider is usually placed in between the two images to prevent each eye from becoming distracted by the image that is intended for the other. The device primarily served as a source of entertainment and saw its popularity peak in the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. It has a resurgence in the 50s and 60s with the View-Master, a device that would hold a number of stereographic image on a rotating disc.

Today, the underlying idea of using two slightly different images hasn’t changed but the technology has gotten a modern twist. There are modern stereoscopes that can hold your smart phone, and with the help of an app, you can display the offsetting images.

3D Goes Hollywood

Movies are a form of escapism that allows people to connect with an experience that they otherwise may not have in real life, so it only makes sense that we would find a way to become more engrossed in cinema. The technology for 3D movies has been around since the early twentieth century, but it’s had its ups and downs in terms of popularity. At first, it started as a niche market due to how costly it was to produce but later grew to be popular in the 1950s. Over half a century later, 3D movies have developed into the mainstay that they are today.

Movie studios made old-school 3D films by placing two camera lenses side by side in a lateral horizontal orientation, just like our eyes. The left eye footage was shot using one colored filter, and the right eye footage was filmed using a different colored filter. Both sets of footage were then superimposed over each other when projected in the theater using two separate projectors.

Before the movie started, theatres provided glasses with red and blue lenses to audience members, so that one color would filter out one image while the other one would filter out the other. Like the stereoscope before it, the lenses on the 3D glasses created the illusion of three-dimensional depth in the movie. Examples of early movies shot in 3d include Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder and the Vincent Price vehicle House of Wax.

Today, 3D films are still very much a thing, but people no longer wear the paper-thin blue-and-red lens glasses. Now, the glasses handed out in movie theaters contain lenses with different polarizing filters for each eye.

As light travels, it shakes and vibrates in all directions making the paths they take look like waves. All these light waves shifting every which way are unpolarized – meaning they don’t all oscillate toward the same pole. Light can be polarized along a single pole using filters.

The glasses the audience wears have tiny lines etched on the lenses that filter out polarized light. One lens has horizontal lines etched in that filters out the vertically orientated polarization. The other lens has vertical lines that filters out the horizontally orientated polarization.

Directors still record the film using side-by-side lenses, but instead of using colored filters, the film is displayed using two separate projectors that used polarized filters instead. Each projector has a different polarization – one is vertical and the other is horizontal.

Virtual Reality: The 21^st Century Stereoscope

We may not have the hover boards Back to the Future Part II predicted, but virtual reality (VR) technology is as futuristic as it gets. Virtual reality is a fully immersive computer simulated environment that gives users the feeling that they are in that environment instead of the one they’re actually in. VR doesn’t alter your perception of reality, but instead, you become a spectator overlooking the events that are happening in the simulated environment. To increase immersion, VR technology allows you to interact with and explore the computer generated world.

VR is multifaceted and can be used in a number of ways. VR technology has been talked about for a long time now in the gaming community, and as companies like Sony develop PlayStation VR the excitement only continues to grow. But gamers aren’t the only ones taking advantage of the new technology. The medical field has been using virtual reality to train new doctors and to help war veterans cope with PTSD. These productive uses of VR show that as the technology continues to advance, new innovative ways to solve old problems will be sure to follow.

The most popular way to experience VR is using a headset. Virtual reality headsets use a stereoscopic display to give three-dimensional depth to what you are seeing. Like stereoscopic technology before it, the headset shows two slightly different angles of the same scene to each eye to simulate depth. This tricks your brain into thinking that you are in a 3D world. VR headsets also use concepts like parallax, the idea that objects farther away get out of focus and become less detailed and hazier.

As company’s have become more comfortable with the technology, there’s been an increase of parity in the industry. Oculus Rift – who are now owned by Facebook – were one of the first big players, but now companies like Samsung, HTC, and Microsoft are getting their feet wet. Google even offers a low-tech cardboard headset that works with your smartphone.

While the technology has come a long way, VR is still in its early stages. Since it became popular in recent years, its growth has moved at a slow pace. A lot of the new technology in production is behind schedule, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes that it will take five to ten years before virtual reality is fully mainstream. In the meantime, VR will continue to evolve into the future of entertainment and technology.

Stereoscopy Remains Relevant

Over the last two centuries, the stereoscope has sometimes fallen out of fashion, but the concept of stereoscopy remains today through 3D movies and virtual reality technology. As long as we have binocular vision – and that isn’t going anywhere – stereoscopy will continue to be a popular way to trick our brains and provide entertainment.

If you want to keep receiving great content and get our free eBook, sign up below for our newsletter.

Receive our free eBook when you sign up for our newsletter!

Learn how to manage an animated video project for your organization:

• How to decide how much to spend
• Gaining buy-in from your organization
• Choosing a provider and style for your video
• Working with your stakeholders
• Working with the creative team
• How to calculate ROI on your video project
• How to promote your video
• Keeping metrics so you can learn

Get the
Free eBook!

The post History Of Stereoscopy: From Stereograms To VR appeared first on IdeaRocket.

 Elements That Decide What Goes Viral

Before talking about what you can do to give your video the best chance to go viral, there are two questions we must first answer:

• What makes people share?, and
• What gets the viral snowball going?

It can take a perfect storm to make your video go viral, but when everything comes together, you can ensure viral success.

What Makes People Share?

The path of least resistance to going viral is having people share your video on social media. If your video can spread like wildfire over Twitter and Facebook, then your video will go viral in no time. So what makes people want to share a video?

Emotional Connection

People tend to share things that resonate with them on a personal level. Eric Johnson, a content and video specialist for FeedbackWrench, thinks “There’s only one way for a video to go viral. It has to connect with someone. This can happen in many ways, but ultimately, virality is strictly a product of a video that has connected to someone in some way. The key to virality isn’t to impress, it’s to relate.”

Video can elicit a range of emotions from laughter to tears. If you can make a video that’s relatable and can touch people, there’s a good chance they’ll share it with others in hopes that they too will have a similar reaction.

An Ad For Yourself

People love sharing things on their timeline that are a reflection of who they are and what they believe in. Whether it’s a funny video or a political article, people want their timelines to be an accurate representation of themselves. This is great for your video because it’s essentially free promotion. IdeaRocket Creative Direct William Gadea says “A share is essentially an ad for yourself. You are saying, this is how smart I am, this is what interests me, these are the people that fascinate me, this is my sense of humor.”

Social media users tend to be very picky about what they share on their timelines, so if they share your video, you know they are an advocate for you and your brand.

Unexpectedness

This might be the hardest element of going viral to capture. Videos that are unique and stand out to people tend to go viral more often than generic videos. This may seem obvious but with 300 hours worth of video uploaded to YouTube every minute something’s got to give.

Videos can stick out as unique for a number of reasons. Whether your video is funny, creative, or shocking, it needs an edge to stick out from the rest of the pack. The internet is always bogged with content, so it’s important to give people a reason to stop, watch, and share your video.

The above video is a perfect example of a video that went viral in large part due to its unexpectedness. In the video – which was made by Blendtec – the man blends an iPad to show how powerful Blendtec blenders really are. It’s an entirely unorthodox way to display the effectiveness of a blender, but that’s why it works. Complete with quirky humor and a tongue in cheek 80’s inspired set and you have a home run video.

What Gets The Viral Snowball Going?

No matter how good your video is, it’ll need a little push to get it on the right to track to becoming viral. Two aspects that can get the ball rolling are tastemakers and communities of participation.

 Tastemakers

These are the people who can make or break your video. Essentially, tastemakers are individuals who hold a ton of influence in today’s society. This can be anyone from a celebrity to someone who has a lot of twitter followers. A tweet or endorsement from a tastemaker can exponentially grow your video’s audience and accelerate the process of going viral.

Different people hold influence in various communities. Tastemakers can vary depending on what the demographic of your video is in. If you’re making a cooking video, an example of a tastemaker in the food community would be celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. While this an extreme example, even a popular local chef could also be considered a tastemaker within your community.  You don’t necessarily need a tastemaker to viral, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

Communities Of Participation

Gone are the days of one-way communication in entertainment. The internet allows for people to comment on and share their opinions on something in real time. Fans create forums and message boards solely devoted to talking about certain shows or movies. This creates an online community of sharing and interacting.

Also, social media is a place of sharing and communication. People love to share fun videos they just saw to their friends and followers. It makes people feel like they are participating in and having a voice in the success of the content itself. By sharing videos, people are buying into the hype and promoting your video for you; before you know it, you’ve gone viral.

Focus On Your Content

Now that you know what phenomena are behind videos going viral, you can prepare to make it happen. First and foremost, you should concentrate on making your content as good as it can be. You have to put in hard work in the pursuit of making original creative content. Alex Reichmann, CEO of iTestCash, says: “In many cases, viral videos are a result of vigorous work or someone at least being creative. If you rehash what’s already been done numerous times your chances at a viral video could lessen. So first and foremost it’s best not to take any shortcuts when it comes to quality videos.”

Hard work pays off. Without putting time into your video content, you run the risk of putting out a stale generic video that gives people no incentive to watch.

Be Your Own #1 Fan

While some videos go viral organically, you should get the ball rolling with video promotion. Your content needs to be visible and readily available because you can’t go viral if no one sees your video. Promoting your video can be as simple as making a short, catchy title or telling people you know to watch and share – it doesn’t have to be a professional ad campaign. Chloe Mitchell of The Social Select explains that you should “Submit your video to relevant digital publications (Reddit, Buzzfeed, Mashable, etc.) and share with bloggers and other social media influencers in the space. It’s crucial to do heavy promotion early on so do your homework and figure out who would be the best fit and most likely to share beforehand so that once posted you can quickly reach out and increase your chances of being featured.”

These are simple steps that anybody can take to give their video the best chance of success.

When promoting your video, you should play it up with your target audience. If you can get big with your intended demographic first, you then have a dedicated audience, you can count on. Reichmann from iTestCash uses an example to explain this promotion: “Do you have a great video on theme parks? Submit it to social theme park Facebook groups and forums. A video creator that engages with his audience has a higher likelihood of success with videos and will help encourage your audience to help share your videos online.”

By putting an ad on Facebook to a group of people who have relevant interests, you are setting your self up with a good base audience. Starting your promotion with a group of people that you are going to like and share your video with others is a great place to start on the path to going viral.

There’s no secret formula for winning the viral video lottery, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy a ticket. If you want to keep receiving great content and get our free eBook, sign up below for our newsletter.

Receive our free eBook when you sign up for our newsletter!

Learn how to manage an animated video project for your organization:

• How to decide how much to spend
• Gaining buy-in from your organization
• Choosing a provider and style for your video
• Working with your stakeholders
• Working with the creative team
• How to calculate ROI on your video project
• How to promote your video
• Keeping metrics so you can learn

Get the
Free eBook!

The post The Perfect Storm: What Drives Viral Videos? appeared first on IdeaRocket.

In order, they consist of:

• Squash and Stretch
• Anticipation
• Staging
• Straight Ahead Action and Pose-to-Pose
• Follow Through and Overlapping Action
• Ease In, Ease Out
• Arcs
• Secondary Action
• Timing
• Exaggeration
• Solid Drawing
• Appeal

Each principle is vital to the animation process, so let’s dig deeper into each one.

1) Squash and Stretch

Squash and stretch is debatably the most fundamental principle. Look at what happens when a ball hits the ground. The force of the motion squashes the ball flat, but because an object needs to maintain its volume, it also widens on impact. This what’s called squash and stretch.

This effect gives animation an elastic life-like quality because although it may not seem like it, squash and stretch is all around you. All shapes are distorted in some way or another when acted upon by an outside force; it’s just harder to see in real-life. Squash and stretch imitates that and exaggerates it to create some fun.

Check out the example below from the TV spot we did for Eastlink:

When the letters spring from the ground, they elongate to show the impression of speed. Conversely, the letters squash horizontally when they come into contact with the ground. This conveys a sense of weight in each letter.

2) Anticipation

Imagine you’re about to kick a soccer ball. What’s the first thing you do? Do you swing your foot back to wind up? Steady yourself with your arms? That’s anticipation.

Anticipation is the preparation for the main action. The player striking the soccer ball would be the main action, and the follow-through of the leg is well… the follow through.

Let’s take a look at an example of anticipation in animation from a spot we did for Eastlink Wireless:

Notice how the progression of action operates in this scene. We first see the woman as she’s standing on the box. She then bends her knees in anticipation of what’s about to happen and springs into action by leaping from the ground up into the air.

3) Staging

When filming a scene, where do you put the camera? Where do the actors go? What do you have them do? The combination of all these choices is what we call staging.

Staging is one of the most overlooked principles. It directs the audience’s attention toward the most important elements in a scene in a way that effectively advances the story.

In the clip below from our video for Sevanta Dealflow, the placement of the character within the scene allows us to quickly follow his actions and gives us a good sense of the physical layout.

The protagonist can’t see his subordinate, but the subordinate is so busy that the sound of his scurrying to and fro is enough to draw his attention. This motivates the cut to a medium shot, which then pulls back to the two-shot to reveal that his colleague is also worried about this problem.

It builds from problem to realization to shared understanding, to the beginning of a solution, all in a visual telling.

4) Straight-Ahead Action and Pose-to-Pose

These are two ways of drawing animation. Straight-ahead action is where you draw each frame of an action one after another as you go along. With pose-to-pose, you draw the extremes – that is, the beginning and end drawings of action – then you go on to the middle frame, and start to fill in the frames in-between.

Pose-to-pose gives you more control over the action. You can see early on where your character is going to be at the beginning and end instead of hoping you’re getting the timing right. By doing the main poses first, it allows you to catch any major mistakes early. The problem with it is that sometimes it comes off as too neat and perfect.

Straight-ahead action is less planned, and therefore more fresh and surprising. The problem with it is that it’s like running blindfolded… you can’t figure out where you’re supposed to be at any one time.

Mastering both techniques and combining them is the best approach to being a successful animator because then you can get both structure and spontaneity.  And incidentally, this distinction is just as important in computer animation, where molding a pose at each keyframe is the equivalent of making a drawing.

5) Follow-Through and Overlapping Action

When a moving object such as a person comes to a stop, parts might continue to move in the same direction because of the force of forward momentum. These parts might be hair, clothing, jowls, or jiggling flesh of an overweight person. This is where you can see follow-through and overlapping action. The secondary elements (hair, clothing, fat) are following-through on the primary element, and overlapping its action.

Follow-through can also describe the movement of the primary element though. If you land in a crouch after a jump, before standing up straight, that’s follow-through.

Take a look at an example from a video we did for ViewBoost. Watch the sleeves of the “Cheese Jedi’s” cloak when he swings his lightsaber. They move with the momentum of the action, but when it’s over, the sleeves continue to go before settling to a stop.

6) Ease In, Ease Out

When you start your car, you don’t get up to 60 mph right away. It takes a little while to accelerate and reach a steady speed. In animation speak, we would call this an Ease Out.

Likewise, if you brake, you’re not going to come to a full stop right away. (Unless you crash into a tree or something.) You step on the pedal and decelerate over a few seconds until you are at a stand-still. Animators call this an Ease In.

Carefully controlling the changing speeds of objects creates an animation that is more realistic and has more personality.

In this clip from an explainer video we did for Tworkz, the woman raises her arm slowly at first, but it picks up speed as the motion continues. The ease in, ease out technique works to make the action more fluid and realistic.

7) Arcs

Life doesn’t move in straight lines, and neither should animation. Most living beings – including humans – move in circular paths called arcs.

Arcs operate along a curved trajectory that adds the illusion of life to an animated object in action. Without arcs, your animation would be stiff and mechanical.

The speed and timing of an arc are crucial. Sometimes an arc is so fast that it blurs beyond recognition. This is called an animation smear – but that’s a topic for another time.

In the above example from Scandis, the man passes the cash along from one person to another by reaching his arms across the frame. At first glance it may be hard to see the arcs happening, but when it’s outlined on the second time around it’s quite obvious. The fluid arcing motion of the arms adds grace to the animation.

8) Secondary Action

Secondary actions are gestures that support the main action to add more dimension to character animation. They can give more personality and insight to what the character is doing or thinking.

In the above example from a video we did for DeerPro, a deer takes a bite of a leaf sprayed with DeerPro repellant. The primary action is the deer spitting out the leaf when he realizes it’s no good. The secondary action is the slight tail wag that shows the deer’s relief to have the awful taste out of his mouth.

9) Timing

Timing is about where on a timeline you put each frame of action. To see what this means in action, let’s look at the classic animator’s exercise: the bouncing ball that we saw earlier when we were talking about squash and stretch. (The reason this is a popular assignment is that there is a lot of wisdom to be gained from it!)

Notice that at the top of each bounce, the balls are packed closer together. That is because the ball is slowing down as it reaches the peak of the bounce. As the ball falls from its peak it and accelerates, the spacing starts becoming wider.

Notice also how many drawings there are in each bounce. As the momentum of the ball diminishes, the bounces become shorter and more frequent (i.e., the number of frames in each bounce decrease.)

In practice, the success of your animation is going to depend on your sense of timing. Train yourself to listen to the rhythms and timings of your animation. You will see instances where a gag might be twice as funny if you just delay it by three frames more. It often helps to add sound early – whether it is music, voice, sound effects, or all of the above – because the ear is better attuned to subtleties of timing than the eye is.

10) Exaggeration

Sometimes more is more. Exaggeration presents a character’s features and actions in an extreme form for comedic or dramatic effect. This can include distortions in facial features, body types, and expressions, but also the character’s movement. Exaggeration is a great way for an animator to increase the appeal of a character, and enhance the storytelling.

Take a look at an another example from our DeerPro video:

The deer turns into a mini tornado of destruction to show how much damage deer can do to a yard. This is clearly an exaggeration for the sake of humor and getting the point across. (As well as being a homage to the Tasmanian Devil of Looney Tunes fame!) The scene then turns to the young couple watching in horror as the deer ruins their shrubbery. Both of their eyes are stretched wide in bewilderment, and the man’s jaw is practically on the floor. This exaggeration of their facial features is way more effective than a slight frown or small gasp might be.

11) Solid Drawing

Solid drawing is all about making sure that animated forms feel like they’re in three-dimensional space.

This character design by Robert Kopecky for Proscenium is a good example of solid drawing. Kopecky is creating a character that will live through various iterations of history in the video.

He starts by defining the volume of the character, which he describes in this character sheet at a teardrop/bowling pin. Then he adds different clothing, hair, and accessories to the character to take him to various parts of history.

Notice how you can see the other side of the body shape on the inside of the mouth. But also, even when he is departing from three-dimensionality for graphic effect, as in the position of the eyes, he defines that in the character sheet too.

12) Appeal

People remember real, interesting, and engaging characters. Animated characters should be pleasing to look at and have a charismatic aspect to them; this even applies to the antagonists of the story.

Appeal can be hard to quantify because everyone has a different standard. That said, you can give your character a better chance of being appealing by making them attractive to look at.

Play around with different shapes and proportions of characters to keep things fresh. Enlarging the most defining feature of a character can go a long way to giving the character personality. Strive for a good balance between detail and simplicity.

Below are a few examples of character appeal from some of our explainer videos.

So those are the twelve principles of animation! You now know the basic road map to create fundamentally sound animation, so get to work!

If you are interested in animated video production, be sure to check out our portfolio. IdeaRocket creates videos in 2d animation, 3d animation, whiteboard and live action, as well as combinations of these techniques (mixed media.) We provide videos for a diverse range of uses such as healthcare and employee-facing videos.

Credit: Bouncing ball illustration by Angry Animator.

The post The 12 Principles of Animation (With Examples) appeared first on IdeaRocket.