Communications Lab

Jingran Zhang

A Million Dreams (Reprise)

By Hugh Jackman, Austyn Johnson, Cameron Seely
From the Movie The Greatest Showman

Music Soundtrack
Movie Clip Version

 

Concept and Design

The song has two cute girls’ voices singing and a low man’s voice singing at the end, and there are the elements of violin and piano with a gentle flow. The song mainly gives the audience a dreamy and emotional feeling. Also, as the girls’ voices are singing together, I used similar and overlapping black and white “S” to show the echoing feeling in the sound. Also, from my perspective, though this song sounds pretty emotional, it is still powerful and curable with the use of low voice, and the girls’ sounds are committed.

By using the theories including similarity, closure, proximity, and continuity, I think the work applied the Gestalt theory well. The uses of different sizes and orientations of “S”s used the principle of similarity and good figures and can bring a neat image, the curved letters matching with the flow in the song as well. Also, with the “f”s connecting with each other on a curve, we can feel the continuity and the gentle flow in the song being represented. Also, with the use of black and white in the design, we can view the closure parts of the work. In the figure and ground relationship, I used the white color as my background and used the black color and color contrast to give the work more depth.

Process and Conclusion

In the process of the design, I had my first draft before the mid-critique. In this work, I used the comparison between black and white to show the difference between the sounds. Also, I wanted to build the feeling of the words bursting out from the dark side to the bright side. However, the results didn’t go well. The image gave the audience a realistic imagination of something growing from the ground as there was a straight separation between the colors, but the whole composition did not seem nice. Also, the dreamy and emotional feelings could not be shown as there were too many angles in the image.

(In Progress Work)

Therefore, in my adjustment to the work, I thought of the advice from the professor and my peers about using curves and creating a dreamy feeling in the work. I started over and kept the dreamy, magical, and emotional feeling with the long flow of the song. I started with the white background and S as my main figures and got them connected to show the feeling of echoing. Also, for the violin and piano played, I used typing on the path to use a lot of f on the way and create the feeling of flow with the principle of continuity. Then, I added the part of black to create depth in the image and show contradiction and closure in the image. I adjusted a lot on the color contradiction part to make it seem more balanced.

(In Progress Work)

If I had more time, I would consider adjusting the black part to make the figure and background clearer to be distinguished as the professor advised. Also, the change in the main figures can be shown more clearly to highlight the main part of the work.

Project Presentation

 

How do the aliens’ language and communication styles in the story differ from human language (oral, pictographic, phonetic, etc.)?

Human beings communicate with oral language that each word has its pronunciation and the word has its own meaning. Words can be grouped and these combinations have their new meanings and can build up sentences. In oral communication, language is highly dynamic, allowing for nuances such as tone, pitch, and rhythm.
According to the reading, the oral language is quite similar between human and alien languages. The aliens’ language also has certain words with certain meanings based on their own lingual system. But the pronunciation of the words sounds more vague for us humans to recognize.

For written communications, human beings commonly use an alphabetic script. These alphabetic writing systems represent individual sounds or phonemes with symbols and can build words with different symbols or letter combinations. Also, logographic writing languages like Chinese use symbols to represent entire words or morphemes and arrange the words in lines to create sentences.
The aliens’ writing appeared to be logographic. They use images to indicate different meanings, but these images look more like a bunch of intricate graphic designs. For the combination of the words or sentences, the different graphic designs seem as if they had been melted together, and actually, some parts of the logographic writings were rotated and distorted to show the combined groups in words. The logograms weren’t arranged in rows, a spiral, or any linear fashion. Instead, the aliens would write a sentence by sticking together as many logograms as needed into a giant conglomeration without punctuation. According to the linguist, it’s a complex semasiographic writing system. It appeared that a semagram corresponded roughly to a written word in human languages: it was meaningful on its own, and in combination with other semagrams could form endless statements.

According to the reading, the aliens’ language didn’t follow the pattern of human languages, as expected, but it was comprehensible so far: free word order, even to the extent that there was no preferred order for the clauses in a conditional statement, in defiance of a human language “universal.” It also appeared that the heptapods had no objection to many levels of center-embedding of clauses, something that quickly defeated humans. Peculiar, but not impenetrable. The heptapods didn’t write a sentence one semagram at a time; they built it out of strokes irrespective of individual semagrams.

In human language, our speaking and writing of the language are corresponded. But aliens have two systems for writing and speaking. For the alien heptapods, all language was performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize. It has its own system of rules for constructing sentences, like a visual syntax that’s unrelated to the syntax for their spoken language.

 

How does the physical structure of our body inform the way we communicate? How about the aliens?

As human beings, we use our larynx to make sounds and pronounce different words with tones and rhythms. Also, we use gestures and body language to express our moods or relate to the content spoken. Humans also use their auditory system to recognize the sounds that a human larynx makes to communicate. Human beings also use writing to communicate, using the alphabetic and logographic systems to represent the languages.

The heptapod aliens probably used their bodies to speak as the linguist heard brief fluttering sounds and saw a puckered orifice at the top of its body vibrating, possibly showing that it was talking. The aliens have an orifice on the underside of their body, lined with articulated bony ridges: probably used for eating, while the one at the top was for respiration and speech. For writing, they did semasiographic writing by inserting limbs into a large socket in the pedestal and creating a doodle of the script.

Also, the reason why the logograms are rotated can be related to their body structure. The aliens’ script isn’t word-divided as a sentence is written by joining the logograms for the constituent words. They join the logograms by rotating and modifying them. Since their bodies have radial symmetry, they don’t have a concept of forward direction, so they can read a word with equal ease no matter how it’s rotated.

In the first assignment One Black Square, we applied Gestalt Theory to designing black-and-white compositions. With a 13*13cm black square, we created a design on a white background.

For my first work, I used a circle that was separated into parts and assembled the parts into a main pattern. Using the principles of closure, I created several circles and semicircular shapes. Also, I used the symmetry principle to make the composition seem more arranged. I placed this main structure at the one-third point of the canvas to make it more stressed and make the composition more balanced.
For the materials left, I used the principle of similarity to cut the pieces into certain groups of shapes and placed them on the other part of the composition. With the pieces paving the way to the left-up corner, there is a continuity can be seen in the image. Most of the elements are round on the bottom side and the angles are sharp on the upper side. I tried to create a comparison and make the composition more balanced in this way.

For the second piece, I used the similarity principle and cut the square into several isosceles right triangles. To make the work more creative, I cut some of the triangles into pieces and use proximity principle to arrange them and make some intersections between the triangles.
By removing some small triangles between the crossover part, I created closure also. For the leftover triangles, I used symmetry and continuity principles to arrange them to the two sides of the composition. Also, when attaching them to the background, I used the one-third rule to place the beginning and ends of the triangles to make it more balanced. From the composition, I hope the audience can find the feeling of flowing in the image. 

For the additional piece, I still used circles as the main element in my composition. I tried cutting the circle into pieces and arranging them based on the symmetry principle. Then I separate them into smaller rectangular shapes and arrange them based on the proximity principle, giving the sense of movements. With making a space between the central circle and the edges of the piece, I created a closure there. Also, I followed the continuity rule for the central circle edition and symmetry for the other parts approaching the edges.