HRWiki:Subtitles

From Homestar Runner Wiki

Revision as of 17:10, 26 August 2006

SUBTiTLE'd!

Purpose

Some of us have started working on subtitling Homestar Runner Flash cartoons to make them accessible to a wider audience. Some non-native speakers sometimes need to go over the wiki transcript just to see what a word or two means. This way, it's already inside the toon window itself. Also, we could open the door for people with hearing problems who still want to experience Homestar Runner like the rest of us.

Some flash artists like Weeble from Weeble and Bob and the people behind Too Much Spare Time Animation have already added subtitles to some of their toons. Apparently, The Brothers Chaps have thought about subtitles already.

Where we stand now

We have a beta version up and running here. The subtitles are tested for the latest Firefox and Internet Explorer 6. Go check it out! Click on "watch" to watch the toon with subtitles, and click on "XML" to watch the subtitles source file.

We are in the process of changing the subtitle file format, so please do not use those XML files as examples for your own work.

How to Write Your Own

• To write your own subtitles, you need to watch the toons with a seekbar. The best way to do this is with Phlip's all-in-one Homestar script. You need to install Firefox and Greasemonkey for this.

• Then open the sample subtitle file (link will follow). The root element should look something like this:

 <transcript xml:lang="en-us" width="550" height="400">

Make sure that every value is set correctly. The language should be set to "en-us" if you make English subtitles. The width and height values must be taken from the homestarrunner.com HTML page for your toon. In Firefox, right-click on the page (not the Flash toon), and choose "View Page Source" to find the values. For most toons, this will be 550 and 400.

• Now copy the transcript from the toon into it. Go through the transcript and put each sentence on one line (or a few sentences, if they are said together).

• For each of your little chunks of transcript, use the seekbar to find the number of the frame when the chunk starts, and the number of the frame when it ends.

• Now you turn all this information into XML like this:

Assume that Strong Bad says "I have my very own a-The Cheat!" from frame number 348 to 372. You would write it like this:

  <line start="348" end="372" speaker="strongbad">I have my very own a-The Cheat!</line>

Every line that you define like this will be displayed as one subtitle between the frames 348 and 372. The text will be red, because that is Strong Bad's color for the subtitles.

Here is a more complicated example from cheatar:

  <line start="512" end="529" >
    <strongbad>Then what good are you?</strongbad>
    <thecheat>The Cheat noises</thecheat>
    <sfx>Pop!</sfx>
  </line>

Three things happen between frames 512 and 529, and they are all displayed as one subtitle. Strong Bad's text will be red, and the Cheat noises will be yellow. Both the sound effect "Pop!" the the cheat noises will be displayed in parentheses to show that they are not actually spoken.

In the first example, the <line> tag has an attribute speaker="strongbad" that indicates that the whole subtitle text is spoken by Strong Bad. In the second example, this attribute is missing, and each speaker has it's own element.

• Now, how do you know that it's "strongbad" and not "Strong Bad"? These IDs are defined here. Every character has his or her (or its) own ID that you can use to indicate who is saying what. You have to use one of the IDs listed in that file. Of course, new characters will be added over time.

• In addition to these character IDs, you can also use "sfx" for sound effects such as "Preeeeow!".

We will make a testing environment available within the next few days, so you can try out your own subtitles whil eyou are working on them.

List of subtitles

External links

• The current subtitles page