This spring, I got to revisit a project that is very dear to me. It is the first part of an episode of the Tradições Brasil (Traditions of Brazil) series, which was produced by Cinevideo Productions and directed by Caetano Cury, and whose script I translated ten years ago.
This episode is about one of the most important and curious celebrations in the state of Bahia, Brazil, called “Festa de Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte”, or “Festival of Our Lady of the Good Death”.
The Festival
The Festival of Our Lady of the Good Death happens every year from August 13th to 17th, in Cachoeira, a municipality located 75 miles from the capital of Bahia. It features a procession that goes around the city with women from the Sisterhood of the Good Death dressed in traditional outfits holding candles that attracts tourists, researchers, historians, and photographers from all over the world.
“People talk about slavery in such a natural way… but slavery was something so serious that black people did not believe, they never believed in freedom, you know? After being enslaved, they never believed they would be free again. Black people only believed in true freedom after death. Hence, Good Death. In that process, they asked to die because they believed that, by dying, their spirits would return to Africa, free. Death, to them, would mean freedom. That is why I say: Africa has always celebrated Death. Death is a state of freedom. (…)”
Valmir Pereira dos Santos, excerpt from the book Nós, os Tincoãs.
I could spend a whole lot of space on this blog talking about all of the wonderful details such as the symbols, clothes, foods, rituals and political agenda that permeate this celebration, but I digress. I recommend you take a look at this Google Arts and Culture exhibit if you want to know more about the festival and about the Sisterhood of the Good Death.
The Task
The video for this episode contained audio and on-screen text in Portuguese that I wanted to localize into English. After reviewing my ten-year-old translation, I was ready to work on localizing the on-screen text, which turned out to be a much more difficult task than I first anticipated.
Dead End
When I chose the video for my project, I first thought it would be very easy to replace the on-screen text because I had some contacts from the production company who could give me a hand in case I needed it. I proved myself wrong, as I found out that no one knew what that font was, and to make it worse, I found out that the person who edited the series had been a friend of mine who passed away a couple of years ago. I had reached a dead end.
What the Font!?
All I had was a fancy font burned into my video, so I decided to use the only tool that anyone who has ever had this problem before has tried: font finders.
I tried them all: What the Font!, Font Squirrel, What Font Is, Font Spring Matcherator, but none returned a good match.
I then started searching for fonts that had a square feel, but that wouldn’t look totally like a digital or tech font. They all failed miserably.
At this point, I though about giving up the project altogether.
Then I decided I would find a font that could express the groovy yet very ethnic vibe of the original one, and I ended up with a solution that pleased me, even though it had a very different style from the original.
Editing and Replacing
With my replacement font in hand, I proceeded to edit the video on Premiere Pro. First, I isolated the clips where the text appeared on screen and worked on replacing them with After Effects compositions.
On After Effects, I created masks over the text and replaced them with the Content Aware Fill, which turned out so much better than I thought it would!
Continuing with After Effects, I replaced the text and animated the letters one by one.
Then, I went back to Premiere Pro, where the text from After Effects had automatically replaced the old one, and I started working on subtitling the rest of the video.
Final Result
Since the original video was more than 9 minutes long, I could only work on a couple minutes of the localized version. I was very glad with the final result considering I didn’t have all of the resources that I needed for completing the project the way I wanted.
Main takeaway: it’s always good to know who edited or worked on computer graphics for an audiovisual piece you are working on. They may have access to assets and information that can be priceless for your work.
This is the localized video:
You can see the original video here:
Source: https://www.salvadordabahia.com/festa-de-nossa-senhora-da-boa-morte/