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Localizing Brands and Licenses
(note: if you work on an illustrious franchise, risks are minimized as well. Established characters are easy to cast: most of them have had official "local" voices for years, whether it's James Earl Jones [Darth Vader voice] Donald Duck or James Bond.) Nevertheless, game production constraints are a hassle for your licensor - especially if we're speaking staggered movie release. For instance, French and Spanish will need to be ready for the first NTSC SKUs, while French and Castilian Spanish versions of the movie might be scheduled to release in Europe only a few months later. (See Figure 3). Worldwide releases are a bit easier - your licensor will have everything ready more or less at the same time. But then you will deal with more languages simultaneously.
Figure 3: Pink illustrates SKU 1 with US, French and Spanish (usually on NTSC versions). Observe how early localization needs to kick off in comparison to its local movie avatar. Bonus Material:Movie excerpts, let’s call them movie clips, are the bonus material section highlights. Surely your marketing department will be delighted to advertise on this. It's usually stipulated contractually (the licensee will have the right to use up to X minutes of feature footage – the selection of which is generally up to the licensor). This is one of the reasons why you also want your game voices to resemble the movie. Following the same logic, you need these movie clips to be ready on time for your development team to reformat and integrate. Very likely you will receive high resolution formats such as QuickTime movies with separate tracks for each language and end up using Bink in your game to minimize disc space requirements. On your licensor’s side, this means that dialogues need to be adapted, recorded and mixed for each language. That requires of course early selection (this might prove not so easy as movies undergo a lot of last minute editing changes especially animation) and some serious organization on your licensor side to avoid schedule conflicts. No licensor, unless he has arranged for it beforehand, will rush post production to meet your deadlines; the stakes are simply too high. That's why you want to go over this when you sign the contract. Plan B consists of subtitling the U.S. movie clips, but this creates TRC issues with first parties, especially with SCEE whose standards are super picky. Sony wants game versions to be consistent. If your game is partially localized (U.S. voices with subtitles) it totally makes sense to have subtitled bonuses. If it's a full localization (localized voices) then having subtitled bonus material will look odd and break the player's immersion. Of course, everything is negotiable with first parties, but you might have to negotiate over more serious matters, plus it's not entirely satisfactory for consumers, all the more if your target audience is kids that do not read. Localizing licenses and franchises greatly depends on a successful relationship between licensees and licensors, and can be far less tedious if properly scheduled and conducted. Licensors will behave very differently whether they have a solid consumer product department and if they have enough in-house resources to follow-up on deliverables and sufficient interest in helping you. Some will have a very scrupulous “by the book” attitude and will check every single submitted item, requesting many changes. If possible, try to find out in advance what their structure is like, so that you understand how you can help them help you. Get to know people and think positive! |
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