Thimbleweed Park Italian fan dub Project - Official Thread(TM)

As you might already know, there’s a small group of Italian TWP fans that decided to make a fan dub for TWP as soon as they read that the game might be some day open for user voice overs and user translations.

In these days we worked a bit to produce a small “trailer”, dubbing sentences from the Ransome Lookalike Contest. Our efforts came to conclusion today, when I could finally bring it all together in video form.

So there it is, in all its pixely and Italian-sounding glory:

With the voice talents of:
@Guga with a cold as the Dragon
Healthy @Guga as Corey
@ZakPhoenixMcKracken as Ken Thien and Cory
And @Gffp as Ransome the mother*beeping* clown.

We hope this small demo brings more interest in the Italian community and pushes people to take part in the project!

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I’m impressed by the quality of acting.
Too bad for @Gffp’s mic…
But the result is far beyond my expectations.
You all three are good amateur actors, but @Guga deserves a special mention. You act like a pro, mate!
And note that I’m quite choosy in judging actors. That’s maybe, as I told you, because I used to be an amateur actor and director back at high school.
I’ll be in it, when It’ll be.
I think 4 male actors is a good start, they could cover almost any character.
But we need at least 3 girls… Do we have any yet?

And it would be very nice if one of our german friends wants to join us and act as Boris!
Would anybody like to essay his italian pronunciation skills?

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Oh that was great!
@Gffp was great as Ransome but I agree we need a better mic.
Btw. do you record actual expletives like the original Ransome actor?

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Thanks :smiley: you know, I also did some acting in high school and university. In fact, I got to know my wife in an acting class offered by the university - we even got to do voice acting for a fairy tale audiobook. And that answers your question:

We have some candidates :stuck_out_tongue: at least my wife, she would make a good Sandy. She’d also be a good Ray, but she has too many lines and my wife doesn’t have the time.

He’s a great Ransome, but I also think the audio quality can be improved.

And, yep :smile: he read all the swear words. In fact, we fed the lines to Rhubarb to get the lip sync files and sometimes you can really read the beeped word :laughing: for example in the first sentence, but most of all at 1:54, after “Manson Family”. Then @ZakPhoenixMcKracken added the beeping sounds.

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We may improve the sound quality.
We tried different hardware and software, recorded in different locations, then adjusted the sound, like noise reduction and volume levels.
For instance, my voice (the winner contestant) is 60% while Ransome’s is 30%… but it results like Ransome’s voice is louder than mine.

This short movie is a test, useful to understand where we could improve.

@Ema feel free to join our dedicated Telegram group, anytime.

Compared to the others your voice files still sound quieter (especially Cory, for Ken as a member of the audience it works well), while Ransom’s voice sounds clipped (which probably happened during recording).

That’s what happens when distortion comes in. You can make them even volume, but there’s nothing you can do to make Ransom sound ok. It needs to be rerecorded using different gear.

If you struggle with volume you need to check out compression / limiting and EQ in your software. Compression is a difficult subject (limiting is more basic) but maybe you can improve something with presets you will have there. Getting this right just by balancing overall volume is hard because the voice jumps up and down in volume all the time, even in one sentence (hence it needs to be dynamically compressed).

But overall, except for Ransome, I think it’s decent for what it is. I hope you had fun!

Thanks for your hints.
I edited all the files using Adobe Audition (Cool Edit successor), which has many EQ filters and adjustments.
I didn’t try this time, but I will do next time.

Since this is a HUGE project, there’s no “when” :stuck_out_tongue: we’re starting to organize roles according to each one’s possibilities and interests, but basically one could start right now. We have 16k lines to dub in total, the sooner we start the sooner we’ll end :slight_smile:

Anyway, to those who want to take part in it, this is the Telegram group:

Telegram: Join Group Chat [EDITED, previous link wasn’t working]

Some of our forum friends are already there :slight_smile: there isn’t much activity right now, it’s basically just me and Zak discussing the above video, but we’re glad if more people come!

There are about 10 female roles to assign to, and about 20 male roles.
We noticed that recording through the smartphone gives very good results, compared to cheaper headphones + mic.
Besides, smartphones gives you an important thing: the freedom to record anywhere :wink:

But you should try to record somewhere with no reverb and no background noise nevertheless :stuck_out_tongue:

But what if my bathroom has all of that? :open_mouth:

We’ll be lucky if we find 10 males and 5 females, who will be certainly enough. I’m not on telegram, I’ll join nex weekend.

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This is a call-out to the Italians here! We need voices!

@seguso, we’ve been trying to contact you since quite some time, will you be our Doug?

Reminder: to join our open Telegram Group, click the following link
(the previous one is no longer valid)

https://t.me/joinchat/AVttzkE5YBc69594LBkaMw

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I edited my post too :slight_smile: thanks

Sorry guys, I’m swamped with work, totally exhausted.

No Doug voice for me, I’m afraid.

Just to be clear:
we are taking this dubbing project seriously.
Actually, we have listed all the TWP characters and assigned roles to a handful of people.
We are currently selecting people (casting) and recording voices.

We are very determined to complete this project.
It will require time, but keep in mind that everyone can record his own voice using his own smarthphone (in any place, anytime), then upload the audio file to the group.
It will be subsequent processed (noise reduction if needed, volume adjusting, EQ filtering, and so on).

Except for the thousand-euros professional mics, we have found that the built-in mics in modern smartphones are excellent for the voices.

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OK, there is no need to do it now, let’s see in a few months, during spring/summer.
Would you like to wait, to see if you will have more spare time?

Please?
Pretty please?
Please with sug… ehm no, not this one!

In a few months? There’s hope!