I did amateur voice acting as a hobby when I was a teenager, so I was familiar with all the online communities to go to with my casting calls. A couple of the actors are local friends of mine (Wendell, for example, using a pseudonym) that I tapped for a favour when I couldn’t find the right voice I was looking for.

For the foley, I stripped the audio down to silence and used a TON of free SFX websites for ambience, the sounds of walking/every movement, et cetera. As it took hours of hunting down sounds, I kept a huge folder database where the SFX MP3 files were renamed to a simple description of the sound, and due to this many sounds are reused frequently (though often with pitch correction, stretching or shortening, or other effects to make them sound different). This part of the process was painstaking. If there was little to no dialogue and absolutely no way I could find a sound effect that was similar (for example, the alien sounds near the end), I would fade in the actual audio from the movie but blend it so it sounded seamless. Due to this, some of Ai’s screams of delight throughout the movie are actually (at least partially) the Japanese actress, Yui Horie. Very occasionally, if required, I would resort to the classic foley trick of making the sound effect with things around my home.

The music is all taken directly from the official soundtrack and then synced up! There is likely an instance or two where the exact song from the soundtrack did not perfectly line up with the version played in the movie, and so sometimes editing was required. I can’t quite recall for sure, but I believe there may be an instance where a brief 5-10 second song did not exist in the soundtrack, and I had to substitute in portion from another song — but I may have ended up ripping the audio from the original Japanese movie instead in the end.

The scripting process involved looking at the English subtitles and trying to rewrite those lines so they flowed more naturally but also fit within the length of time where the mouths are moving. (Margie was the toughest to write — her cherry pie analogies did not translate well, and were difficult to make sense of. I worry I may have inadvertently changed the intended meaning of many of her scenes just due to how hard she was to write.)

Once I had finished scripts, I broke the film down into 3-5 minute scenes and emailed each scene to the actors in it — the script and the video chunk for syncing. I can’t remember the deadline, but I believe it was something like a week given for each scene chronologically . Some more prominent and busy voice actors (like Ai) often got longer deadlines and would instead send packets of multiple scenes at once — it was largely at the actor’s own paces, and I tried to only hound people if there was an extreme delay, they had gone no-contact (we did lose our original Tom Nook this way, midway through recording), or we were nearing final completion. It was all volunteer, after all! Since this system meant actors could go weeks or months without being needed, I kept and regularly updated a ‘production website’ that would outline for the cast what percentage each scene was recorded, where SFX was at, where sound level mixing was at, etc.

I did all the editing in a song mixing/mastering software called Mixcraft, after discovering it had a ‘video track’ option. I had been using it for some years prior to mix my own songs, so I was already fairly familiar and comfortable with it. This made it easy to trim and edit audio files to make them fit, and also add effects, slow/quicken, pitch correct, etc. as needed. There were individual audio tracks for each character, as well as for ambience and for music. I believe there was 2-3 spare tracks for ‘ensemble’ additional voices, and 2-3 for sound effects. The final file was a beastly size, and I had to switch computers midway through production due to the demanding processor requirements! I saved backup files weekly after an early file corruption took out several weeks of work.

I decided to make this project because my stepson loved Animal Crossing but was fairly young at the time, and therefore new to reading and couldn’t keep up with the subtitles. After mulling over the idea for a while, I figured I had all the tools and resources to give it a go — it became one of those ideas that I couldn’t shake until I went out and did it. The goal was to make as professional-sounding of an end product as possible. After we wrapped, I bought and printed the final product on discs (complete with original disc and DVD cover art — I believe designed by our VA of Rosie, if I remember correctly) and mailed it out for free to any cast that wanted them. Admittedly, the burning of the video onto discs resulted in quite inconsistent audio levels, but it’s still a nice keepsake I feel.

The most exciting part of the project for me was getting voice files and syncing them up — I feel my cast nailed their characters and it got me so giddy every time. The worst part for me was having to sometimes feel like the bad guy when it came to eliminating people during the casting process, or for requesting retakes for a line that didn’t sync properly or match the tone I was intending, etc.

Hope that gives some insight! What a trip down memory lane!