#im still an amateur in writing so this may not be my best work lol

[yanxioustrikas]

If I can ask abt your oc’s I wanna ask what’s Roland Altivo’s relationship w other characters? :3

hii! thank you sm for the ask! i'll try to answer this to the best of my ability since i haven't really develop roland much (and also i suck at writing and whatnot so bear with me here lmao)

ms (eva) altivo

roland's older sister by three years. the altivo family are a bunch of competitive folks who will do anything to strive to the top! so roland is no exception. this usually results in an ongoing sibling rivalry. it's not extremely hostile or anything, it's just these two love competition, and both have similar goals, executing them in their own way. at least their parents never pitted their children against each other, otherwise eva and roland would have been plotting to murder each other. during high school (eva as a senior and roland as a freshman), when the siblings both made it to the debate team, they were forced to be put in the same group because the supervisor feared that putting them in two different groups would result in the a non-stop intense debate between the altivo siblings.

lena long

roland's colleague when he was working for futbol 360 as one of the news anchors. he decides to be petty by starting beef with everybody at his workplace, but lena does not give a crap about roland's antics. since then until he left futbol 360, roland has been trying to get lena's attention, which his efforts were futile. however, he does respect lena since she is a very successful news reporter. it's not much of a dynamic, because eventually roland grew tired of trying to start beef with lena after he left futbol 360 (no, he did not get fired because of beefing with his colleagues).

sunny hellström* (the weatherman from 'weather or not')

roland's classmate from university and 'frenemy.' these two fools have such an interesting dynamic that it's confusing to say the least. do they both like each other or hate each other?? besides his sister, roland also considers sunny to be his rival (and vice versa), despite them being in two different field in journalism. when roland had sunny on his talk show roll up with roland, he managed to subtly roast sunny (and sunny doing the same).

erasyl mcarthur* (the guy that ms altivo fired in 'live and kicking')

one of roland's writers for his talk show roll up with roland. roland immediately took in erasyl after the poor dude was fired, because he liked the guy, and also because he wanted to get back at his sister as a 'haha f you eva!' moment. the thing is, with erasyl being a part of the mcarthur family (ocs of @abyss-strikas !), roland has to be careful because any wrong move that would have affected erasyl, he's going to have to answer to the mcaurthers, and very likely the entire silver lions club. heck, they might drag eva in this too.

notes:

erasyl's full name and sunny's surname are both non-canon

the mcarthurs and the silver lions belong to @abyss-strikas

[prinnamon]

Hello! I saw your post about subtitling and fanworks other than fanart and fanfics and you mentioned being a subtitler yourself. If you’re okay with answering this could I ask how you started being a subtitler? (if that’s even how it works lol) I’m guessing it depends on what you’re subtitling but I’ve always super appreciated subtitles and the ppl that make them and think it would be fun to do

hope you have a nice day/night!

this ask sat in my inbox for a while because sadly my PC's power supply unit failed and made it less convenient for me to write lengthy posts. however! i'm back in the swing of things and im too excited to let it sit here any longer.

long post under the cut!

to start off, i wanna make it clear that what i do currently is write english-language subtitles for english-language content on YouTube! there is no translation involved. i'm not confident enough with any other languages to sub any other kind of content. so all the advice i can offer is gonna be related to my specific experience! (i'm learning that maybe i should have used the word "captions" instead of subtitles to eliminate confusion. you can tell i am an amateur and not a professional since i thought the words were largely interchangeable)

i started doing captions for fun several years ago as a fan of The Shrieking Wizard Co! that company/channel had an associated discord server, and there was a section for fans to submit captions for their videos using a service called Crowdscriber. i was not super good at it or familiar with any of the best practices at the time, but i could make out even overlapping voices pretty well and i had a lot of free time!

the SWC is no longer around as a company, but even before that i'd fallen off of doing captions for them since school started to eat up all my free hours again. recently, though, i picked the habit back up and started doing captions for a niche machinima series that a friend got me to watch! the first episode and a half already had captions, so i was dismayed when i realized the rest of the series lacked them. in a sort-of special feature video from a couple years back, the creator mentioned plans to enable community captions so fans could pitch in if they wanted! however, since then, YouTube has removed the community captions feature.* but the creator is still active and the series is still ongoing, and i figured i probably had the tools available to me to caption the episodes on my own. i reached out to ask if he'd like the help, and he said yes! so wahoo!

a lot of creators would probably be happy to accept volunteers to help them with captions. some larger creators may even be open to offering someone a paid job at it. the worst they can do is say no or not respond, so there's really no reason to be afraid of reaching out about subtitling one or more videos that mean a lot to you! sadly, this is not going to be as reliable for older stuff on abandoned channels. you may have the resources you need to subtitle something but no way to reach out to the creator so that your subtitle files can be uploaded and seen.

the first step of my process was to download all the episodes of the series that i wanted to caption! it's also fine to go one at a time if you lack the storage space, of course. i used VLC to download YouTube videos (check out this tutorial! it wasn't what i used at the time, but i think the one i did use is out of date and your odds with this one might be better!), but i know there are other reliable options out there.

YouTube's built-in caption/subtitle editor is pretty ass and not fun to work with! i find it frustratingly limiting. luckily, there are free programs which do it better. i've got decent experience editing videos, so the free version of the program DaVinci Resolve is my subtitle editor of choice since it feels very much the same as editing videos like i'm used to. i'd open it up and take some screenshots to show off the process, but my PC is currently not functioning. i will say that i found it pretty easy to muddle through after a couple basic "how to add subtitles in DaVinci Resolve" tutorials.

i still don't know if i'm the best person to give lessons on best practices for captioning, but here are some very basic guidelines i try to adhere to:

don't let captions take up more than two lines on screen at their standard size! three or more lines of captions cover a lot of what's happening on screen. there are times when it might be absolutely necessary because characters' lines are overlapping while other sounds are also occurring which are crucial to the viewer's understanding of the scene, and that's okay, but 3+ lines of captions should really be a rarity.

generally try to have one sentence on screen at a time! there are plenty of exceptions to this. for example, a character may utter several short sentences in a short amount of time (eg. "Yes. Okay. I understand.") which don't make sense to break up any further because the captions would be flashing on screen for such a short time, impeding readability. moreover, a character might say a sentence that needs to be broken up at a logical midpoint so it doesn't take up three or more lines on the screen.

preserve comedic and dramatic timing. sometimes the above rule must be sacrificed so that the punchline of a joke or the narrative twist of the knife is not revealed before it's supposed to be revealed.

sounds that characters acknowledge and react to, or which impact your understanding of the scene, should be represented with a caption. the audience probably needs to know about [distant gunfire] and [pained scream]. however, in a lot of cases, a sound is implied by what the audience can see or is unnecessary to their understanding of the scene. the audience probably does not need to be told that the door which they can see opening is making the sound that a door makes when it is opened. the audience can probably infer that the character who they can see walking is making audible footsteps. but then there are times when these sounds might be important because the characters comment on or react to them. it's situational. i say use your best judgment.

generally, above all, be courteous and remember that subtitles are a tool, and they're not something silly with. it's really not the place for jokes. it's more clear and useful when a gasp is captioned as [gasp] as opposed to [O_O] or [le terrified gasp]. it's more clear and useful to describe the sound of an airhorn as [airhorn] than to write [HOOONK!!!]. and please don't use captions for extensive easter eggs and inside jokes. like alt text, it's not a place to hide treats for people who click a secret button. it's an accessibility tool. (i'm pretty serious and passionate about this point, and i don't wanna see jokes about it in the reblogs or replies.)

if you can understand and transcribe what's being said, you Must do so accurately. this includes swear words. this includes slurs and disrespectful language and words and subject matters you're uncomfortable with. if you can't bear to type these things out, you're not the person who should be writing captions for this particular piece of media. if a hearing viewer can hear it, it must be captioned. deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers deserve to know exactly what is being said.

this page might be able to help you get started with some more specific professional guidelines! i disagree with some of these; for example, subtitling a foreign language as [speaking French] is really not ideal, because a hearing viewer who speaks French would be able to understand what was said, so you're giving the folks using the captions an incomplete experience. like i said above, if you can understand what's being said, transcribe it accurately.

YouTube accepts at least a few different file formats, including .sbv and .srt (if you're saving as an .srt from DaVinci Resolve, make sure to check ".srt Without Formatting"). proofread your work before sending it out/uploading it to catch surface errors! in fact, i recommend checking the captions in YouTube's subtitle editor by uploading them on a private video to see whether it throws up any errors at you or has any unintended formatting junk that you need to go back and eliminate.

i hope this was somewhat helpful and can maybe inspire you to go for it yourself! this mostly felt like me rambling about my personal experiences and opinions, haha. at the very least, if this didn't make any sense, maybe you can look at it and go "well if she's this incoherent and can still write captions/subtitles then certainly there's hope for me" lol. thanks for inviting me to talk about the thing i'm passionate about. it's a joy whenever someone asks me about this. i hope to get to do it as a job someday (though i'm not looking forward to when i inevitably have to caption somebody as [speaks Spanish] due to professional practices).

*i have heard from one or two folks that YouTube's now inviting viewers to contribute captions in a different way, by "providing corrections" to a video's auto-generated captions! even if this is true, i have to say it doesn't really excite me. in my opinion, trying to work around the automatic first pass is usually a worse experience than starting from scratch. the auto-generated timings tend to be really bad, usually not cutting naturally at the beginnings and ends of sentences, and that's ignoring the fact that auto-generated captions also censor swears and transcribe many things incorrectly. YouTube really should never have removed community captions. i hope they get brought back or replaced in a meaningful way