Formula Re-ducks Press Q to take cover.

Five Whole Years…

I founded Formula Sub on December 31, 2006 after the collapse of the one fansub group I had previous experience with, Fansub no Tameni. You may remember them as the group who worked faster than Ayu on The Third. I'd been a QCer on, like, four episodes.

Things started off slowly. I had no idea how to run a fansub group. limegreen was the first person to join and stick around for more than a couple days. He taught me the very basics like how to register an IRC channel, set who was a chanop, stuff like that. After a month or so I was exhausted in looking for translation help on Animesuki and fansubbers.org, so went to some random Japanese Yahoo group. Somehow, I found someone who was interested in translating. By this time martino had joined the group as encoder; Minatsuki had joined as typesetter; Raserei_Hojo had joined as timer; applechewer_ as editor; Radiodaddy as another QCer. We determined that our best bets would be Moonlight Mile or REIDEEN, the latter of which was 24 episodes, since neither of those had any groups interested. We ended up choosing Moonlight Mile since it was shorter, which didn't start for a month or so. In the meantime I practiced timing, font styling and k-timing.

We found out that a preview would be aired. This, plus the fact that Moonlight Mile was one of the first anime aired in HD, led us to believe the show would be something special. The translation of the preview came after a week or so, and then the first quandary began. I was young and anxious, and when Raserei_Hojo disappeared for a few days, I took it upon myself to time the preview and choose the dialogue font. This upset Raserei_Hojo, who left shortly afterward. I've no idea what happened to her. In any case, after much antagonizing over my noob timing, we released the preview on February 26, 2007. The translator, Raito, disappeared in the meantime. While I managed to find a replacement for the first episode, she was not happy with the tone of the show and agreed to only one episode.

We were left in uncertainty until Vincent, the leader of Shinsen-Subs, stumbled into our channel. They had recruited a new translator who was interested in Moonlight Mile. He proposed a joint where they would provide translation and distro while we did everything else. Frosty took over translation of the show. Vincent helped fix up the credits' typesetting and provided "moral support." We gained Lykos and soon after theknife as quality checkers. Lost from Shinsen also stepped in to help QC at times. I don't quite remember why applechewer_ left, but it was probably due to me taking his job as editor over after episode 4. Things were going well until after episode 7, when Frosty disappeared for almost two months due to family issues. We gained _V0iD_ (who later became Light-) as timer (initially as a typesetter) to help me since we had also started to joint with Shinsen on Hitman Reborn, as well as Nor as a quality checker. We ended up finishing the show in late July, two months after it ended, but it was our first completed series.

Formula assimilated a one-man group and gained shadow-of-sin as a translator, though he was not very confident and soon relegated himself to translation checker. xlr8 joined at this point to help translate Keitai Shoujo, an odd web series with way too many typesets. We finished KS without any memorable difficulties. xlr8 had come from a group working on Les Miserables and wished to continue his work with Formula. However, he was even more interested in a new OVA series that would be released that summer -- Tales of Symphonia.

We knew this would be an important project and went on a recruiting spree. When we did Episode 1, Formula was working on Moonlight Mile and Reborn at the same time, so I did not want to stretch us too thin. We found KeiStriker to do the karaoke effects and AizawaYuuichi to do the typesetting. martino's friend dj_tjerk provided us with an awesome title screen. I remember playing like 12 hours into the game since no one knew how far into it the first OVA would go. As far as we knew, it would only be four episodes, remember. Heh.

At this point I believe we lost Minatsuki to real life. His work from back then is still better than I can manage (since I took over as the group's typesetter after he left). At this point we thought we were hot shit and decided to joint with an even smaller group who had a good translator but crappy everything else called Tatertotz. We helped the finish the final episode of the first ToHeart OVA series. The translator, potatochobit, was impressed with us and agreed to translate a show for us in the fall of 2007: Shugo Chara.

This started our downfall from being hopeful noobs to bitter and reactionary fansubbers. We assumed it would be a 13-episode show, maybe 26. There was only eight volumes of manga out at that time. We found mechakucha to check translations. I think Symphonia had showed the group how to put more effort into fansubbing, and it shows in SC. martino was on top of his encoding game and even made a title screen in AFX. Lykos and I did the karaoke effects (which sucked, but it was better than anything else we personally had made). I had learned some better typesetting at Shinsen and put it to good use (heck, the font style I used on SC is still in use by some CR rippers). I still get that odd feeling of nostalgic hopefulness when I watch the opening. We didn't think the show would be very popular - and really it wasn't - but there was something about it that made it likeable. Dissidia joined the group as a translation checker once mechakucha disappeared and helped with SC and ToS.

That winter we released the final episode of the Sylvarant arc of Symphonia on December 30th. We lost our QCer Nor at some point because he was out of town and we skipped him on one episode of Symphonia, so he got upset and left. No clue where he went to, if anywhere. Formula has been odd in that people who quit the group don't go to other groups, they just quit, full stop. I remember that week we released a lot of stuff. We got pretty good at getting basically one episode per day done, especially of Reborn (we often got 3-4 scripts at a time from kingofbraves at that point). I really wish we still had the database from the front page we had set up back then.

Yotsunoha was some weird 2-part OVA that shadow-of-sin felt confident enough to translate himself, with xlr8 checking. Meltingice joined us as a quality checker around this time as Lykos was offline. By this time the third cours of Shugo Chara had started. We lagged big time on episode 27 waiting on the title screen. This was around the time when transport streams became widely available, and this allowed us to bump the resolution of SC from 400p to 576p. We also went to the effort of translating all the opening credits (and poorly typesetting them, lol). By now we'd realized that fansubbers were not seen as respected providers by the community anymore. From Shugo Chara 27 until 41, when we finally stopped, our site and channel were constantly trolled. We were accused of holding completed episodes hostage. Not only that, but martino had chosen to implement a then-new encoding technology -- ordered chapters. If you don't know, this basically means that the opening and ending (i.e. parts of the show that always have the same animation) were released as separate files from the main episode file. On any normal setup, you put all three files in the same folder and it plays together just like any other encode. However, many users did not have a normal setup and accused us of cutting out the OP/ED. We saw it as bandwidth savings during distro since we were now distroing two of each episode. Things only got worse when members of BSS started releasing at a pace slightly faster than ours. This made it look like we were holding releases again (to a small group of morons on /a/). Funny aside, I got banned from 4chan for "spamming" after I talked about our SC release before the torrent was publicly viewable (by around 10 minutes, if anyone remembers scarywater it would take a while for distroers to hook up to the tracker after it was uploaded). We ended up gratefully dropping the show in October '08 when it was licensed by Crunchyroll.

In the meantime we had done the ToHeart2 -ad- OVA series. By now we had a pretty set staff of myself, martino, potatochobit, shadow-of-sin, Lykos, theknife, Light- and Meltingice. We'd also picked up and dropped Allison & Lillia. It was a new joint with Shinsen (which I had joined by then) with a very, very good translator who got off IRC "for a few days" for family business and never returned. We did the first episode of the Mai-Otome 0 S.ifr OVA series with xlr8 translating (it was his idea to pick it up in the first place), but he got lost in the either before OVA2 released and we had to drop. I remember I had to ask theknife to edit since I had no clue about Mai-Otome. We released the movie Sword of the Stranger with Shinsen as well. It was a very difficult project that martino and I hated by the time it was done (all because the translator was a huge asshole who tried to be the timer and editor). We switched from our old format of front page/forum to just a blog. We picked up Antique Bakery, which no one liked but we had found a good translator who wanted to do it. Unfortunately, he was a troll from gg who dropped the show after two episodes, and of course we found no replacement. We tried to revive Les Miserables, but it killed three translators with no work ever getting done, so we dropped it after doing only a couple new episodes. Hitman Reborn, which we'd subbed for 82 episodes, was picked up by Crunchyroll. We did not feel like getting sued.

If you couldn't tell by now, a lot happened to the group in summer '08. Dropping Shugo Chara was basically the first death knell for the group. xlr8 had basically disappeared once Symphonia's extras were done. potatochobit did too once SC was dropped. All our translation checkers left. Radiodaddy, our first QCer, had left. This was also the first time in a long time the group had nothing going on. From these points you can actually go back in our blog and see what posts I made, like this one in January 2009, one of many which featured me asking myself rhetorical questions. That actually made me remember that we had the page here first, then imported it to formulasub.com, and then moved to the blog here when I couldn't afford it anymore.

Finally in April we released the first episode of Phantom with Chibi-Fansubs. It was pretty bad due to crap translations. The show was picked up by Funimation after episode 2. I waffled back and forth between continuing or dropped, and finally decided to drop after releasing episode 3 without a group tag. Funny side note, I spent like six hours editing episode 3 because I used the actual visual novel to check the translations. If you play the game side-by-side with our episode 3, you can see that I basically pulled most of it from the official game translation, haha. martino, our encoder and my right-hand man who'd been through everything I had since the group started, decided to retire after this. I thought I had found a translator for CANAAN that summer, but he disappeared long before it started. Another funny story -- he later joined the group and has no idea I know it was him to stiffed us before. Meltingice and I tried to do Mouryou no Hakou using yesy's scripts, but they dropped after episode 2 because Cyprene was being Cyprene. This disappointed me because a) no other group was translating the show, and b) I spent like three hours matching the font from the OP credits, lol. I also tried to revive Moonlight Mile season 2 at this point with a known group, but the translator didn't do anything for like six months so I lost faith.

We ended up jointing with Chibi again on Umi Monogatari, a pretty awful show that had some pretty awful translations at times and a pretty awful anonymous encoder (who we later found out was Kristen from Chihiro, ha). It took forever to finish and was not enjoyable at all. Then they wanted to do DVD versions at 600MB an episode! Hell no. Vincent threw us a bone in the form of the AT Votoms: Big Battle OVA since I had worked on the Pailsen Files OVAs at Shinsen.

I was ready to let Formula fold. None of us were really happy or excited to sub, and we were working on just one terrible joint. Things suddenly changed, though, when someone approached me to do translation checking for the Tethe'alla episodes (I started recruiting way early, I guess). He suggested that he translate a show for us in the meantime - one that was being streamed on CR. I agreed even though it was "risky" and none of us knew anything about the show. That translator ended up being a godsend for us, as Sasameki Koto was the first TV series we'd finished since Moonlight Mile. Meltingice settled in as encoder. Lykos returned to help theknife QC. I also had my own IRC bot by then. Our translator also did the TO OVAs as well as Cencoroll. We felt as if the bad times were past- and they were, for the most part.

While our saviour of a TL worked with a different group for that winter, dexturo suddenly appeared to translate Ookamikakushi. Our string of luck continued! We did have a few errors in episode 1 that warranted a v2 (mostly because the TLC was checking against Chinese subs, though we didn't know this until later). We did a couple episodes of Omamori Himari until the TL lost interest because of too many loli characters, lol. The highlight of Ookamikakushi was being faster than gg on episode 5. An 11 hour turnaround without actually speedsubbing was awesome. It was the one time that nothing went wrong and everyone was around when their turn came. In March we moved trackers from the legendary Scarywater to a different one that ended up not working out. It was hard to move and rehost all our old torrents, even with 100Mbps backing up my bot. We ended up at Nyaatorrents. Ookamikakushi finished on time, and I'd planned to go through the show again and fix all the errors, but by the time we were done with the show both my personal seedboxes were gone due to money issues.

In April 2010 we started the Tethe'alla episodes of Tales of Symphonia with xlr8 back at the helm and dexturo TLCing. dexturo also stuck around and worked on the series Arakawa Under the Bridge. Arakawa 01 gave me a lot of grief. It was a Shaft show, which meant lots of dialogue, lots of signs and lots of puns. But I liked the humour of the show and we all gave it our best. However, a number of translation and editing complaints arose, which we ended up fixing after compiling a comprehensive list. A third funny story: I told people we would not do a v2 until I knew we had identified all errors, which /a/ interpreted as me saying "please TLC this for us." Our v2 was universally accepted, so I guess crowd sourcing the TLC worked fine, lol. theknife was busy with real life by this time, so we found anon1 and had him as our QC slave along with the venerable veteran Lykos. We also found a real TLC in Validictus.

I really did think dexturo would come back. His job required him to move to different countries, and after one such move he never got back on IRC. Now that I think about it, I think dexturo was a girl... Can't remember. We had to drop Arakawa UtB. Tethe'alla episodes continued regularly, and we started on the Votoms: Phantom Arc. Around this point I was talking with GotWoot about jointing on Moonlight Mile S2, which didn't work out at all. Looking at the blog posts it seems dexturo did return for a short time and then disappeared again before we could finish Arakawa episode 8 (which I do have a partial script for, heh).

Oh, Meltingice and I did a CR rip of Occult Academy to pass the time. Since the other rippers we tried to watch were not up to par.

The translator who'd saved the group three seasons before had us joint with ANBU on Amagami SS. Between Tethe'alla 2 and 3, xlr8 disappeared again and let the bonus episodes pile up in the corner. I pulled the plug on the donations page and replaced it with the For Sale page, which had been equally useless. I guess by this time we'd grown past the drama and such, because things seem to proceed pretty smoothly and regularly. I had Formula take over the Votoms Phantom Arc since Shinsen (the group and its website) died and we were doing most of the work anyway. We finished Amagami late, Votoms Phantom Arc late, and released Tethe'alla 04 late(ish, since there's no one else doing it) with the help of tenkenX6 checking translations.

I "retired" after this point. Didn't fansub at all, didn't get on IRC at all, didn't even check the site. I was happy. Finished more video games than I'd finished in years. Had all kinds of free time. But I knew we had to finish Tales of Symphonia. No one else even attempted to do the Tethe'alla episodes, so I could only imagine how long it'd take for someone to finish the United World episodes. It's our legacy.

That brings us to the present. theknife and anon1 are gone. [s]Meltingice might be too[/s]Meltingice was on vacation! tenkenX6 is [s]MIA[/s]alive and well. It's just me and xlr8 [s]left as of this moment, working on Symphonia[/s] dragging our feet on Symphonia.

edit: I was going through some old files looking for some other old files and happened across some more history. martino and I originally wanted to do Polyphonica, since the preview of the VN was pretty cool and it seemed like it'd be decent (lulz). We didn't find a TL for it and set our eyes for the next season and chose School Days (further lulz). For some reason I made some clipart-infused comics to explain the situation.

The Worst Case Scenario
A Joint is Born (I'm always the dog for some reason)
limegreen Comes to Terms (He wanted us to joint with his other group on Reborn)
Expectations (A Commentary on Leechers)

I also remembered that we were going to sub the movie Piano no Mori. We had like half the script done when someone else released (Froth-Bite?) and stopped work.