That which doesn't
kill us makes us stronger.
Friedrich
Nietzsche
If Nietzsche is to be believed, I'm a stronger typesetter
than I used to be, but it was a near-run thing. It's taken about three months
to typeset the whole show, and there were many times I was ready to throw in
the towel and go back to Yawara!-style
{\an8} signage.
Shirokuma Café is
a very sign-heavy show. I think this is a direct consequence of its low budget.
Stationary characters talking against static backgrounds don't give the eye
much to do. (That's why the show works so well as a radio drama, once you’ve
internalized the characters' images.) Adding signs is an inexpensive way to
make the backgrounds more interesting. In addition, signs provide a way to add
some humor for the adults watching the show, as I'll describe later.
Accordingly, the signs are a vital part of the show's visual style; at least,
some of them are.
Which Signs Matter?
In a show that's using signs as enrichment for backgrounds, not
all signs are going to be important. In fact, most of them won't be. The problem, of course, is how to know which
ones do matter. The only real option
is to translate them all and then decide.
The original translators provided the first
clues. They translated about half the signs, and the ones that they translated
are generally significant, usually for underlining a joke. (The endless puns
are often reinforced with signs.) Unfortunately, the untranslated half can also
matter.
When I started, I had to take a screenshot of every
untranslated sign and then pester a translator to tell me what it meant. (Many
thanks to convexity, deltakei, and Moho for putting up with this.) However, as
I went along, I realized that the vast majority of the signs were in hiragana
or katakana rather than kanji, so that the target audience of children could
read them. Decoding the secondary alphabets is not a slam dunk, but it's much
easier to deal with 40-odd characters than 4000. With the help of online sites
like Nihongodict, I became more proficient at decoding hiragana and katakana
and translated some signs myself.
The vast majority of the untranslated signs don't matter,
and after a while, I started to omit signs with no relevance. For example, in
episode 13, I typeset every menu item in the yakitori bar, complete
with movement. In later episodes, I ignored those sorts of restaurant placards.
In episode 20, I did as many of the festival booth signs as I could. Later, I didn't
bother with most street signs.
But despite all the irrelevancies, every now and then an
untranslated sign turned out to be significant. In episode 15, the "Dodo Bird"
store sign is the punch line for the second half skit, and the joke simply
isn't as good without it.
Insert or Overwrite?
When a sign is typeset, there's a fundamental choice to be
made: insert the English into the scene, leaving the Japanese intact, or mask
out the Japanese and overwrite it with the English. I ended up doing both, with
very little consistency. Usually, though, I prefer to insert the English. My main
reason is that the backgrounds for signs are rarely flat. They're often textured or shaded. Overwriting with a fixed color mask can produce a
fake-looking result. However, if the background is uniform, the sign doesn't
fade in or out, and there's no space for the English otherwise, I will
overwrite the Japanese. The yakitori bar menu signs in episode 13 are all
masked and overwritten.
Font Matching for Fun
and Profit
If English in inserted into a sign, it really helps if the
English font resembles the Japanese lettering. Thus, font matching is one of basic
first steps in setting a sign. Polar Bear
Café's signs are mostly done with a single font family. When I discovered
this and realized that I had all the fonts, I sort of went overboard. Every
sign was scrupulously matched for character shape, character weight, and so on.
As a result, I ended up using more than 130 fonts.
Experienced typesetters don't do that. They realize that the
subtle differences among Japanese fonts are rarely carried over into
distinguishable differences in the English letters. Accordingly, they tend to
typeset with a small repertory of fonts able to represent entire font families:
gothics, minchos, etc. By the end of the series, I was able to see font
families, but I still fell into the trap of trying to match fonts exactly.
One side effect of this is that each episode may contain
eight or ten massive CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) fonts, bloating the
episode’s footprint and even breaking certain players. Accordingly, I started compressing the CJK
fonts, either by stripping OTF subfonts to create a "small" OTF, or by
converting just the ISO-Latin characters into a really small TTF. Converting to TTF is more reliable, but it can
have the undesirable side effect of changing character sizes. Accordingly, remember
to compress fonts before use, not afterwards.
Compression had another undesirable side effect: elimination
of special characters used in signs. As a result, many of the key fonts had to
be compressed a second time, retaining specific special characters, and the
episodes that used them redone. This is why episodes 1-13 and NCED01 will get
v2s.
Color Matching
In addition to font matching, inserted English needs to
match the color of the Japanese sign. Aegisub makes this easy with its color
picker, but there are subtleties. As my wife the quilter points out, colors are
not absolute; their appearance is changed by what surrounds them. I was
constantly frustrated about this. An exact color match would appear faded if I
added blur (and \blur1 is almost mandatory), or it would appear brighter if I
added a dark border. I found I was often overriding the “exact” match for
something that pleased my eye better. And that's a slippery slope, because my
color sense is poor, at best. The yellow in OP1 doesn't really match well, for example. I
made it too pale, and I still can't
find a value of yellow that I like.
Movement
While some signs are static, many appear to move.
Computer-based animation tools make it trivial to pan, zoom, or rotate a scene
or sign to add some dynamism to a static background. If a sign moves, the
English must move too (and if the sign is overwritten, the mask as well).
In the Dark Ages, the typesetter had to approximate movement
with subtitle tags like \move, which assumed that motion was linear. This
rarely looked good. Nowadays, motion capture software allows object movement to
be tracked precisely, and Aegisub macros can translate the capture data into
frame-by-frame typesetting. This bloats scripts enormously but provides very
satisfying pans and scaling. (Motion capture is described in great detail in
unanimated’s tutorial on typesetting.)
The motion capture software does have its limits, however.
It's not terribly good at capturing rotation, particularly if that's combined
with other forms of movement. In the first opening to Polar Bear Café, the circular show logo rotates and then begins to
tilt down, eventually becoming a roadway. I had to fade the show title out
a few frames into this sequence because tracking was lost as the circle began
to deform. In episode 36, Grizzly’s door sign rotates on a pivot. The tracking
software gradually lost the angle of the sign, and the sequence was ultimately
set by hand.
Another limitation is that the motion-tracking software
can't deal with true hand-drawn animation or deformations. Irregular changes
between frames, particularly in object shapes, cause the software to goes off
the rails. This was most evident in the Tanabata wish sequence in episode 13,
where the paper tags containing the Tanabata wishes blow, twist, and curl in
the wind. Every position in that sequence had to be set by hand. Fortunately,
the animators were pressed for budget, and there are only 16 distinct
configurations of the most critical sign, Panda's wish. However, the sequence also zooms in, so when a
configuration repeated, the English had to be scaled and repositioned. That
sequence took a week to do, mostly because I'd start to tear my hair out every
few frames.
I’m fairly dissatisfied with the Tanabata signs. The English
doesn’t appear to move correctly. This is because hand-drawn animation is not
accurate. Angles and character sizes change from frame to frame, often
incorrectly, but the eye forgives because it has no other reference point.
However, when English is introduced, the discordance is obvious. The Japanese
is moving "consistently," and so is the English, but they are not moving consistently
with respect to each other.
Stock Signs
One interesting aspect of typesetting a long series with a
low budget is getting to see how much animation (and signage) is reused. Polar Bear Café uses stock shots, like the front of the zoo, the front of the café,
and the front of Panda’s house, as a cheap way of indicating scene changes. If
these stock shots contain signs, then the typesetting can be reused, with minor
changes for coloration or zoom. I ended up compiling a "stock shot" index for
the series, so that I could simply cut and paste the base typesetting for any stock sign.
The show also has standardized sets. Two of the most
frequently used are the interior of the zoo office and the street in front of
Rin Rin's florist shop. The zoo office has a whiteboard with the monthly
schedule, always labeled "Schedule for the Month." Rin Rin’s shop has standard
signs and is adjacent to a bookstore (just Books) and a gallery (Gallery
Morita). Across the street is an antiques shop (just Antiques Shop). All of
those signs were reused frequently.
Animation Errors
Another aspect of typesetting a long series in getting to
see how often there are animation errors. Scenes are farmed out to different
teams of animators, and sometimes details are inconsistent. For example, in the
drive-thru restaurant sequence in episode 4, the microphone for ordering disappears and
is replaced by a piece of horizontal trim as Polar Bear's car passes through. In
various hand-animated sequences of Grizzly’s door sign in episode 36, the margins around the
Japanese word vary wildly from frame to frame. BluRay editions often correct
animation errors found in TV releases, but not in Polar Bear Café.
Summary
I'm still not a proficient typesetter. I stand in awe of how
easy some of my colleagues make it look. However,
I think Shirokuma Café looks better
with typesetting, even if it's far from perfect. I hope you’ll agree. And
if there are any highly experienced typesetters out there who are interested in the show…
there are still some signs I have no
idea how to do.
