A little backstory, I've been interested in subtitling for ages, having done the odd sub here and there, but is was only at the end of 2023, that I became serious and obssessed with it when I felt compelled to subtitle the nirvana the band the show webseries.
So, yeah, thank you Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol for getting me into my favourite thing in the world by subtitling my favourite show of all time. It's the greatest joy
Check out my nirvana subtitles on my drive, and keep reading to know how I went about making them.
The Challenges
The References
This show is very heavy with pop culture references, which means I have to spend a lot of time searching for terms and song titles when captioning for it
The Improv
The vast majority of the dialogue in this show is entirely improvised and Matt and Jay aren't improvisers at this point so there's a lot of stammering, mumbling, talking fast and such that can make understanding what they're saying difficult. (I find it very retable.)
The choices
The band's name
I fun thing I notice about nirvana the band the show is that there's no fixed captalization of the show's name or the band's name
Obviously, there's nirvana with one n for the webseries and nirvanna with two n's for the TV series and beyond, but wheater or not you captalize the words nirvana, the and band is up to whoever is writing it
For the webseries specifically, I decided to keep the band's name all in lower-case. That's how it's capitalized at the end of the episodes and I find the idea of Matt and Jay writing it like that charming and very in-character.
I'll always refer to the entire series as nirvana the band the show. All in lower-case, with one n, but when subtitling anything made after the webseries, nirvana will be with two N's and captalized, the other words is up to whatever.