Built by hand · Localization study 03
Motor Lion City, the trailer
A 45-second trailer for my feature script, made in English and neutral Latin American Spanish at the same time, entirely in ElevenLabs. Both languages are the original.
I. Watch
Drag the handle across the frame. You hear whichever language holds more of it.
II. Lip sync
Sync fits the mouth to whatever audio it's given, so the Spanish never had to match the length of the English. Dubbing has always been built around that constraint. Here it didn't apply.
I wrote most lines to play over shots where the speaker's mouth isn't visible. The video model gave moving mouths to people I'd framed as listeners anyway, so eight of the twelve shots needed sync. Where two people share the frame, I synced a crop of each speaker's face and set it back into the shot, so only the right mouth moves.
| Shot | Line | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Dolores and Duke | "We got a real job for you, son." / "Hecht wants Delray." | The model had Dolores talking through Duke's line. I synced each face on its own crop |
| Elevator | "There aren't many people in Singapore…" | Sonal stands behind Anthony, but the model had her talking. I synced a crop of her face so his stays still |
| Car at dawn | "Me?" | Anthony's mouth moved behind the windshield, so his line needed sync |
| Steakhouse office | "You can't commit robbery here!" | I regenerated the shot to calm the manager's hands. Anthony's "Why not?" drops into the gap in his take |
| Taxi queue | "ANTHONY!" | One take for both languages, synced on Dennis's close-up |
III. The Spanish calls
Short lines leave no room to hide a bad choice.
| English | Straight translation | Adapted | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| "…son." (Dolores / Hecht) | hijo / hijo | mijo / hijo | Dolores is warm and in charge, so she says mijo. Hecht gets the colder hijo |
| "Do you know where Singapore is?" | ¿Sabes dónde está Singapur? | ¿Sabe dónde queda Singapur? | Formal usted. The joke is how politely he says it |
| "I am." | Lo soy. | Yo sí. | What people actually answer to "¿Eres de Detroit?", and just as short |
| "Gross." | Asqueroso. | Qué asco. | What people actually say |
IV. How it was built
Every image, shot, voice, note and sound came out of ElevenLabs. Nothing was filmed or recorded, and nobody was cloned.
- One face, twelve shots. I picked one generated look for Anthony and used it as the reference for every shot he's in.
- Two video models. Gemini Omni Flash 1.1 for most shots, and Seedance 2.0 when the lobby shot failed twice.
- Designed voices. Eleven new voices across both languages, with Eleven v4 audio tags for delivery.
- Score and sound. One Eleven Music cue cut to picture, and nine generated ambience beds.
- Seeded grain. 16mm-style grain, identical in both languages frame for frame, which is what lets the slider work.
Localization has always meant making the real version first, then dubbing it and trying to get close. I don't think it has to work that way much longer. If I'm creatively committed to more than one language market, I don't have to pick an original and chase it. I can make two equals. In this trailer, both languages are the original. They went through the same process, and you can drag between them.