Raised so far: $ 77/ 50
Update: Wow! That was fast. The goal is already met. Thank you to all who donated! The project page should be up tomorrow! Please note there is no longer any need to donate. Any donations now are purely just general donations rather than toward this work.
Original Post:
Today I’m starting a donation drive for my Valentia Accordion project. The project this time is to mainly scan artworks and translate relevant portions of interest (such as concept art or new information).
The book is an art/design book for Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia that will feature Hidari’s official character art, profiles, and design work never before seen, among other things. A lot of Fire Emblem fans (myself included) are looking forward to seeing what we can find, and especially getting access to higher resolution art!
A skeleton of the contents are as follows:
- 1 Visual Gallery – Character art gallery by Hidari. I plan to scan all of these for sure as it will likely contain the unseen official artworks too!
- 2 World & Story – Story Summary. Likely will go untranslated, though some things such as timelines and other lore building things will probably be looked at by VincentASM.
- 3 Character Archive – Ingame portraits & intros to characters. This will likely not provide any new information to the characters, so will be low priority.
- 4 Concept Art – 150+ concept art from Hidari & IS staff. This is the main section I am interested in translating of course!
- 5 Extra – Animation gallery, support archive, etc. There are sometimes fun things to be found in here so will also be of priority for me.
One thing to note. Unlike last time for my Tellius Recollection project, I am not sure if I will be translating every single profile this time. However, I will still be translating relevant portions of the text and concept art with fellow translators who want to take a shot at helping out. Images will be the priority this time, such as character artworks.
Please help spread the word!
Read the details below, or skip to the TL:DR in the next section to see the summary. Or, go straight to donating!
Okay, so why the donations?
Usually when I do these, I buy a copy of a book for myself and manually scan it with the spine in tact. It leaves a crease and the scan always has the dark lines to the side that distort any text and image to the side of the page.
So what I want to do is buy a second copy of the book. I then get it professionally de-spined and put time into scanning them to bring the fandom higher quality images.
It worked extremely well with the previous project, Tellius Recollection Vol 2 (Radiant Dawn). You can even compare the quality of those scans with Vol 1 (Path of Radiance) which I did by the more traditional means.
Doing this will allow pages to be scanned completely and individually, which in turn will ensure clean scans. Unlike before, they will be saved directly to higher quality formats (PNG, as opposed to JPEG) –but at the cost of the book itself. This will aid those who want to crop the official artworks (and concept work) for informational or archiving purposes, among other uses. It will also save time on cleaning images when it comes to translating them to look presentable.
Since this is for everyone’s sake, I thought to ask readers for donations to pay for the second book. The target cost is not too much: approximately ~50 USD. That covers the book and import cost, as well as de-spine cost. I am not nor will not be asking for any payment for labor or for the translation itself (I will happily do for the community regardless!)
I will still be importing at least one copy, but as I am reluctant to tear up a collector’s item, I would have to rely on the sort of scans I did for the FE9 book if that goal is not met. You can see on some of the pages the limitations (the black spine line that causes pages to blur and ruins the edge of some artworks, the blur sometimes caused by the book moving during the scanning process, etc). These are limitations that can be worked around, but make life more difficult when it comes to adding a cleaning process and having to cut off some of the official artworks throughout the book.
For example, if you look at Marcia’s page from FE9, the wing of the pegasus was an unfortunate and unavoidable consequence of the current bound-book scanning method. (The image was in worst shape from the initial scan, which I had to put some time into editing to make as presentable as possible). There are many other examples of such limitations you may spot on the compilation post.
If we go over the target amount (I will update when it is met), I will either refund or spend it toward acquiring other FE design books (FE9, FE6/7) to do the same for them, or toward future projects. Please specify in your notes if you wish to donate toward any of these other projects specifically, or if you would rather have a refund, and I will gladly give it back.
I will keep updating with every donation that comes in and answer any questions for maximum transparency.
In the end, I hope to make these translations and scans look as official as they can possibly be! It will benefit the donor as they will pay just a little bit for higher quality.
TL:DR:
What is it:
- A full quality scanning of every official character and concept artwork plus other pages (more details upon release, but will be similar to how the Tellius Recollection Vol 1 project was).
- Target amount: 50 USD (book + shipping + despine). Labor costs and all that are all on me!
- Book releases: March 30th (Arrives April 2nd)
Why:
- Shadows of Valentia hasn’t revealed all of its official artworks, so I thought this may be a good way to give that to the community while translating. But… I wouldn’t want to butcher my only copy!
- Donation money will help me purchase a copy I would feel less guilty about butchering to scan. Believe me, it hurts, even when the book is covered by donations.
Objectives:
- The copy of the book will be separated from its binding and scanned page by page for maximum quality.
- This will allow high quality scans in a PNG format that will be available by request, and will aid in the final translation’s quality. The site will have JPEG format to preserve space but high quality will be offered as a bulk download when complete.
- Easy access to any page of the book in digital format, that would normally take many hours of labor simplified by the lack of having to worry about the book’s spine.
- Please note I aim to scan and translate parts this book regardless of donations. This is by no means obligatory, but it will aid in overall quality as I will be limited to trying to scan with the massive spine in the way of my single copy.
(Ironically the TL;DR may be longer than the actual details…)
HOW TO DONATE:
If you have Paypal, then simply use this donate.me link.
If you do not wish to use PayPal but debit/credit cards, then use this button!:
RAISED SO FAR: $ 77 / 50
Update: Complete! Thank you!
If you have any trouble, or questions, and even requests, please email me (contact info on “Contact” page).
Please note I will still be attempting to scan and translate the book regardless of donations. This money’s purpose is to acquire a second book for quality purposes. This disclaimer is to avoid any confusion, such as for people who may read it as “if the donation is not met this project will not go.” That is not the case!
If you still of course wish to donate beyond paying for the book, feel free, but again, I do not wish to look reliant on your kindness to continue.
A big thanks to everyone who donated in the past and enabled me to acquire such books to translate! I hope what I do is enough to give back for your kindness. Every bit of donation (no matter how small) helps keep me going and doing what I love to do: translate FE info!
