Music Video: Ang Nabigong Pakikipagsapalaran

You might not be surprised to learn that TMP gets a significant amount of traffic from the Philippines. After all, all of the staff editors are Filipino, my wife is Filipino, and I have a lot of family over there. They share links with their friends, and our Filipino viewership continues to grow. Conditions there make miniature wargaming challenging, but Filipinos are familiar with online gaming, and enjoy our content here.

While we have been providing Filipino (Tagalog) captions for our videos for a while, we have not yet done a Filipino-language (Tagalog) wargaming video yet. So this was the first!

Gemini translated the lyrics from our music video about dungeoncrawling:

Ang Nabigong Pakikipagsapalaran

Ang mga pader ng piitan ay lumuluha ng malalalim na lihim,
Sumasayaw ang liwanag ng sulo, gumagapang ang mga anino.
Tumatulo ang tubig, at may mahinang pagdaing,
Nawawala sa mga bulwagang ito, ako ay nag-iisa.

(Koro)

Dungeon blues, isang mabigat na kalagayan,
Itong hangal na kulang-palad, sa buong magdamag.
Wala na ang aking pangkat, isang kaawa-awang grupo,
Ano ang gagawin ng isang bayaning naliligaw?

Ang Unano ay lasing, ngayon ay naging bato,
Sa yabang ng Barbaro, siya ay humiwalay at lumayo.
Ang Magnanakaw ay naglaho kasama ang aking ginto,
Isang trahedyang kuwento na dapat isalaysay.

Koro

Dungeon blues, isang mabigat na kalagayan,
Itong hangal na kulang-palad, sa buong magdamag.
Wala na ang aking pangkat, isang kaawa-awang grupo,
Ano ang gagawin ng isang bayaning naliligaw?

Ang Klerigo ay ipinagkanulo ng kampon ng masama,
Ang Salamangkero ay pagod na, wala na ang kanyang mahika.
Nasaan na ang Hobbit, maliit at mataba?
Hindi malutas ang pakikipagsapalarang ito, puno ako ng pagdududa.

Oh hindi, ano iyon? Doon sa sahig
Katawan ng Hobbit, maliit at bilugan.
Ngayon ay tunay na akong nag-iisa,
Sumpain itong piitan, kasinglamig ng bato!

Filipinos typically speak at least some English, and use a lot of English terms even when speaking Tagalog. For example, how do you say 'music video' in Tagalog? Music video. The AI decided to leave 'Dungeon blues' in English, too.

Pakikipagsapalaran is a complex Tagalog word combining the concepts of fate and taking a chance. The song's complete title, Ang Nabigong Pakikipagsapalaran, means The Failed Adventure.

To my delight, Sonauto had no difficulty singing in Tagalog. Coming up with the right song, however, was a challenge. The song needs to build in intensity and end in shock. Too often, the AI wanted to end the song by singing a few more repetitions of the chorus! I wanted a male voice, but the AI kept giving me female voices.

After giving Sonauto specific music guidance and failing repeatedly, I finally decided to try taking advantage of the AI's abilities, and simply tell it what the song was about:

Song of a lost male warrior, trapped alone in a fantasy dungeon. melancholy, grim

And the music tags it came up with were 'heavy metal, gothic rock, 2020s, hard rock'. Not what I had in mind! However, I couldn't argue with the fact that I got a result that I felt worked… definitely more rocking than the original!

I should mention that I also had the help of a committee of present and former staff editors, who assured me the translation and the singing were good. In fact, they said it was 'deep' Tagalog!

As for the art, I asked AI to take the original art and make the fighter look Filipino:

And once again, I had another AI animate the art.

Caption files were made in Tagalog, as well as English, French, German and Spanish. I find making captions when the art is in vertical format to be a pain, especially since caption size varies depending on how you play the video. This is compounded by the fact that Tagalog is a very letter-heavy language, meaning you need to make more frequent captions than in other languages, in order to keep the length reasonable.

The final step was to combine the music and the animation with titles, using ClipChamp:

I've posted the video as a reel on the TMP Facebook page, where it has done quite well considering it appeals primarily to our Filipino audience.