Japanimation? Lojbanimation!
Every time I go to a convention, there is usually an anime room. Sitting in there watching the otaku enjoy subtitled animation from Japan, I am impressed by how powerfully this medium spreads a foreign language through other cultures. I think back to the anime conventions I've visited and consider the classes on Japanese that they teach there! An entire subculture exists online, called "fansubbing", for amateur hobbyists to translate Japanese culture into English and other languages before it is officially released.
For another example, audiences hear Klingon spoken with subtitles in Star Trek, or Quenya spoken with subtitles in The Lord of the Rings, and are captivated by the setting that language creates. Not only could Lojban gain the speakers that it needs by using this effect, we'll have fun creating a film!
Animation once required prohibitive amounts of time and money. But with the advent of machinima, that's no longer true, if you're willing to settle for relatively crude computer animation. Machinima is a technique for recording a video game while you control it with a joystick or mouse, and then dubbing your own voices onto the action. It's as if the video game characters were being used as puppets.
There now exist programs which exist for nothing but machinima. "The Movies" lets you choose characters, props and backgrounds which you can puppeteer to create your own film. Online virtual worlds such as "Second Life" and "There", while they are used for far more than machinima, are so customizable that they now serve as ideal platforms for it. Google SketchUp is an incredibly easy 3D modeling program that I have learned how to operate. It can be used to create avatars, props, sets and other models to be imported into machinima software.
Hence I imagined Lojban's answer to Japanimation: "Lojbanimation" or {lojbo skina}. An ideal source material would be a short story rather than a novel. In it, the characters should have some reason to speak an artificial language, rather than have English speakers inexplicably speaking Lojban instead. Another ideal aspect would be a story released under a Creative Commons license that allows free copying and derivative works.
I know of no work that meets all these criteria unless we write one ourselves. The best candidate I know of is "Fossil Games" by Tom Purdom, although it's fully copyrighted. The characters live so long that they learn several artificial languages, so it would be a minor alteration to change the story to have them speak Lojban all the time. The sets are easy to build because they're all either indoors or in an empty Mars-like desert. The story has fascinating political drama, hard science, eye-catching characters, and robot combat. It has a crunchy technological coating and a chewy philosophical center which would pull a viewer into the Lojban mystique and culture.
Much of the work could be distributed among multiple people who become excited about this project. It would require:
1: finding or writing a story.
2: converting it into a screenplay format with dialog and voiceovers.
3: drawing storyboards.
4: translating the script into Lojban.
5: modeling the characters, props and sets in 3D.
6: if we decide to use Second Life, probably purchasing land and paying to put the models in it.
7: puppeteering and recording the models in machinima software such as Second Life.
8: recording our voices acting the Lojban script.
9: editing it all together with music and English subtitles.
10: posting it to Youtube and Google Video.
11: submitting the link to my friend Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.net who will probably blog the $#14 out of it.
12: welcoming the influx of newbies.
Comments
temujin9 on May. 13, 2006 10:33 AM
I've been thinking of things like this for a while. Second Life is one possible development source, but large sets would cost a lot. Something like Torque (which Roxor uses for game development) would give you much more powerful control of setting and character.
I've been thinking along similar lines, for a while now . . .
matt-arnold on May. 13, 2006 1:14 PM
I went and downloaded the demo for Torque, but it was nothing like Second Life or SketchUp at all. It appeared to involve 100% programming. That would mean investing a decade or more in learning how to program... kind of missing the whole point of machinima. After all, Maya, Lightwave, and 3D Studio Max give you much more powerful control of setting and character too, and that's why Pixar and Dreamworks use them to create feature films. If I were going to go that route, I'd choose Blender.
temujin9 on May. 13, 2006 7:43 PM
I was going to say Torque has the advantage of being known by someone you know . . . but I like Blender, now that I've seen it . . .
matt-arnold on May. 13, 2006 10:04 PM
I knew you would.
Any or all help you could provide would be praised and appreciated! Tell me more!
temujin9 on May. 16, 2006 3:17 AM
Unfortunately, most of my ideas were higher-end than machinima; I was thinking about stuff like compositing HDR lit models into real life scenes.
Torque would be about a half-step up in machinima. The scripting you need seems dirt easy, but I'm an experienced coder, so that's probably a blind spot. There are plenty of things that can be done without any coding at all, through the world editors. That would comprise the majority of the work for a movie, IMO.
OTOH, I don't know the state of the art in game modding. It might be easier to mod an existing game and use the standard controls for action than to write the script. It just seems like the long way around.
matt-arnold on May. 16, 2006 3:40 AM
I doubt we'll be modding any games or writing any scripts. I'll have to check to see if any of the other Lojbanists know how to do that.
I could certainly use a world editor if it has a graphical user interface. But I didn't see anything about that in the Torque demo.
temujin9 on May. 16, 2006 3:54 AM
Yeah, the demo doesn't show as much what Torque does, but what can be done with it. There is a full-fledged editor with Torque itself. And if you're not modding and not scripting, I don't know how much help I can be, except as a test audience for the subtitled version . . .
matt-arnold on May. 16, 2006 4:01 AM
You could help by doing all the modding and/or scripting! Here we see how Lojban could have been useful, as it has separate words for "we", meaning "me and you but not them", "me and them but not you", and "me, you and others unspecified".
temujin9 on May. 16, 2006 4:30 AM
You seemed too disinterested in Torque; I somehow assumed you were negating modding/scripting as potential paths altogether. If I helped, it would have to be Torque; I'm gonna be using it at work, whereas I don't know and don't have time to learn modding.
And I honestly can't promise more of my time right now. Not if I want to be sure of keeping my promises, anyway . . .
temujin9 on May. 16, 2006 4:31 AM
To clarify: I might be able to promise more in a month or two.
zencuppa on May. 13, 2006 3:52 PM — coffee sermon
Hey Matt,
On a totally different topic, could you send me a text file of your "coffee" sermon? (adaleATmerlynproductions.com) I am working on some coffee songs and need the inspiration.
Andrea
matt-arnold on May. 13, 2006 5:23 PM — Re: coffee sermon
It's available here: http://wiki.penguicon.org/CoffeeRitual
zencuppa on May. 13, 2006 5:38 PM — Re: coffee sermon
Ah thanks!
(Now I've got the urge to make a cuppa . . . )
Are you attending Marcon?
matt-arnold on May. 13, 2006 5:39 PM — Re: coffee sermon
Yes I am.
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