Fandub

The word fandub refers to the non-professional dubbing, by a group of amateurs, of audiovisual material such as films, television series or songs, changing the language original by the language of their community. The term is formed by the contraction of the English words fan dubbed; It is also known as amateur dubbing or fandom.

Main features

The purpose of fandubs is to make available to fans those series or movies that are not dubbed and are only found in languages other than that of the fan. Altering the script, characters or content of the series or movie is called redub. If the dubbing is a parody, it is called fundub (in English).

Fandub is not usually carried out in professional studios. It is most often done with Japanese animated films. Altered versions of the original videos can be found on video portals such as YouTube. If fandubs are made on copyrighted videos, the owners can report their publication and have them removed. There is also fandubbing of songs, which consists of adapting the lyrics of a song so that a singer can interpret the melody in a similar way to the original. For this, the instrumental audio of the song is used as a musical base.

Beginnings

One of the first fandub projects to be recorded was in 1994, "Sinnlos im Weltraum" (Senseless in Space), a German fandub based on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The recordings were distributed in VHS format. With the arrival of digitalization in 1998, fandub became very popular with the German public.

The first known recording is attributed to Mark Sprague's Sailor Moon S, which gained international publicity from Sailor Moon News Group. Sprague's work spurred many others to create similar productions of his favorite series. Because of limited production equipment and modems, many fandubs rarely made it past the audition phase. Another example is a Star Wars fandub by Domi Vogt (Dododkay), in which a scene from the movie was used for a viral marketing parody that rose to fame through the media. German communication.

The concept of radio drama was introduced inspired by the idea of anime drama audio CDs. Radio soap operas contained a pleasant story, and users could create their own series without the need to use frame-by-frame animation. Several fans flocked to Anime Web Turnpike, where a Fandub/Radionovelas category was finally formed.

The first communities of voice actors

Amateur voice actresses Michiru and Laura formed the Voice Acting Resource Center (VARC) as a meeting point for fans looking for a way to get involved in amateur voice acting (AVA). VARC started its web hosting on Xoom.com in 1998, and was subsequently hosted on Revidral until 2001 when Michiru and Laura no longer had enough time to update and moderate the website. VARC maintained a list of radio soap operas and voice overs that were constantly updated, as well as tips, tricks, reviews, and first tips for making fandubs.

During the last months of VARC, another community with similar interests emerged called 'AVA no Yume', AVA's Dream, whose translation into Spanish is The Dream of Amateur Dubbing Actors. Silent Dream was moderated by a core group of VAs (Voice Actors). SDUBB was hosted on aitenshi.nu, a collective website that belonged to the AVAs. Tom Alang, Pixie, Marcy and Malanai, together with the SDUBB members who were part of the AVA community, created a category dedicated exclusively to amateur dubbing. SDUBB was never created with the intention of replacing VARC.

A second VA group was created, later known as FLAVA (Fine Lookin' Amateur Voice Actor), whose translation into Spanish is Actors de Dublaje Amateur Bien Parídos. FLAVA was directed by Christine Lee, a Canadian professional voice actress. It was aimed at beginners so they could hone their dubbing skills and meet other users with similar tastes.

Approximately in 2001 there was a change of authority and those who until then had been dedicated to creating Fandubs gave way to a new generation and the owners of SDUBB withdrew from the community. SDUBB made an attempt to reinvent itself under the tutelage of Tom Galang, but it didn't last. Eventually, aitenshi.nu and SDUBB ceased to exist.

Meanwhile, FLAVA was flourishing. The number of active members was increasing, and new productions were completed weekly. Despite the success of the web domain, Christine Lee left the community to focus on her career. As a result, FLAVA suffered a server crash in 2002. In the following months, some members, such as Matt Cruea and Sapphira, attempted to revive it, although there was little success.

With the demise of FLAVA and SDUBB, the Voice Acting Alliance emerged, VAA gained new status as the conglomerate resource center and dubbing forum.

Subsequently, Kagome created a community in December 2004, the Voice Action Club, also known as Newgrounds Voice Acting Club, which started as a topic on the Newgrounds forums, and became a popular forum, where animation artists Flash were looking for talented voices that would go unnoticed outside of VAC.

The consolidation of fandubbing

The fandub has focused mainly on the musical interpretation of various themes and the dubbing of small shorts from natural or animated series. There are very good quality fandubs of different series that are not commercially available in the countries of the receiving languages. Most series are produced using digital resources with the voice of the actors and are published online. Many times there are sequences available for making fandub in short video segments published on portals such as YouTube.

Guidelines for making a fandub

Both fansub and fandub take into account the following guidelines:

• The material must be completely free for users. It cannot be sold, since this can bring legal actions by the original authors of this material.
• A good quality should be maintained in both the translation of the fragment and the fold in order to facilitate the understanding of the dialogues.
• The authors should be credited and, if necessary, the authors should be authorized to develop and distribute the material.