1. How do aliens in the story using language and communication style different from the human language (oral, pictographic, phonetic, etc.)?

Aliens in this story use “logographic” script, which is phonetically written, and used in Chinese characters as opposed to English and other standard alphabetic script. Dr. Banks realizes that the heptapods’ written and spoken languages are unrelated to each other, different from the human language which are usually intertwined with each other in order to serve as a means of communication from a vocal and hearing standpoint. However, in contrast to logographic languages, the aliens’ script is composed of intricate graphic designs, yet not in any sort of linear fashion, which would make it hard to widely replicate and understand in the human language. The aliens’ “seismographic” language conveys meaning without reference to speech, meaning their visual syntax is unrelated to the syntax for their spoken language, rendering it much different to the human language as the two are connected.

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

The physical structure of our body informs the way we communicate since our anatomy, specifically the larynx, is able to physically create the sounds that we dictate as our speech. Establishing vocal communications is only possible through reproducing sounds that our human vocal tract and hearing the sounds back through our ears. This difference in anatomy makes it interesting to point out that since the heptapods’ bodies have no distinct direction, their script can also be written and interpreted in any direction with ease. If this were translated into human language, all scripts would lose sense of meaning as there are logical directions behind each stroke and position of a word in a sentence.

        Our project is an adaptation of the first and second episodes of a Netflix cartoon series called Hilda. We intersperse some simple games in the story. The story is about Hilda, a fearless blue-haired girl, who lives in a wilderness full of elves, giants, and other magical animals. The whole project is divided into five parts. The first part is the character introductions, which introduce the special creatures in the forest. The second part is a story that Hilda was drawing a troll, which is just a rock with daylight but will become a monster once the sun goes down. She didn’t notice that the troll has awake and started to escape. The user has to keep pressing the space key fast enough to run. Finally, Hilda found out that the troll has no bad faith but to return her sketchbook. The third part is the story that Hilda’s house was attacked by some invisible creatures. She heard someone talking, but can’t see it. The user has to click different parts of the screen to find out that creature. Then, Hilda will find out it’s the tiny elves. They attacked Hilda’s house because Hilda always steps on their house and influence their life. In order to resolve the contradiction, Hilda started the journey to find the king of the elves. In the fourth part, Hilda saw a giant. The user needs to press the space key for a proper time to jump onto the giant to find out his story. Hilda finds out that although the giant looks scary, he also means no harm to other creatures. He is just waiting for his lover. In the final part, Hilda successfully found the king on the mountain, but they encountered some danger since the mountain is actually another giant, who is waiting for the giant I mentioned before. Hilda also reconciled with the elves since she saved their king from the mountain. 

        Although these stories seem to be cartoons for kids, they are a metaphor showing how can human beings live with other creatures harmoniously without hurting them. In the story, the giants are driven away by people who moved to the forest, which is similar to what we human beings are doing now. People expanded their domain to other creatures’ habitat, expelled them, and even killed them since they influence or endanger our life. However, people didn’t notice that actually human beings are influencing other creatures’ lives. What’s more, people always regard wild animals as dangers and hurt them when they tried to get close to us, just like the situation of the troll chasing Hilda. However, sometimes they mean no harm to us. And the story of tiny elves attacking Hilda’s house also alerts us that not only human beings can control and expel other creatures, other creatures may also drive away humans someday. We will also emphasize the interesting relationships between the giant and human beings as well as human beings and the tiny elves. The same conflict exists between them, which is the inconvenience caused by their very different body sizes, but their relationships end differently. The giants finally left the earth because of the repulsion from human beings, while the tiny elves and human beings finally reconcile and live together. 

        In this project, we are referencing to the cartoon Hilda, which is created by Luke Pearson, a British cartoonist. We also referenced to some games with stories, such as the mobile game Onmyoji. In this game, the user has to accomplish certain tasks to trigger the next plot. This mode makes the users more engaging in the story because they have a sense of participation since their actions can determine how the story goes. The games also make the user pay more attention when watching the story, which can better convey what we want to express to the users.

       For the techniques part, we will mainly use the form of video and comic to develop the storyline. We’ll edit the original videos of Hilda to better fit what we want to show. We’ll also record some Hilda’s voices by ourselves, for example, her self introduction, which is not in the original video but necessary in our project. The challenge would be how to make our voice sound like Hilda. If not, we may need to record all of Hilda’s lines by ourselves. If some parts of the original cartoon are too long, we’ll use comics instead. The plots of the story are complicated and there are lots of characters in the story that the users are not familiar with, especially the special creatures in this cartoon. Therefore, another challenge is how to develop the story clearly to the users in a limited web page. For the games, we will probably use p5js to realize some functions. 

For our soundscape project, we try to recreate a crime scene. The idea just popped up in my head at first. I thought the crime scene could be a really unique space to present the collection of sounds. On the other hand, these different pieces of audios can reflect emotion activities from different people on the spot. The podcast Homecoming inspired me in some way. I found that how characters express themselves by audio can convey rich emotions which helps to enhance the general atmosphere for listeners. The theme of a crime scene could also be attractive for listeners because it is not normal or common to see in real life. I believe it will bring more shock and surprise to listeners.

At first, we wanted to build our project based on one main crime scene image with buttons to trigger different audios. However, we found it a bit inappropriate because there is an order for the emergence of audios in every specific crime scene. For instance, the cause, like the sound of the explosion in our project should be the first before the sound of the police and everything else. With the template offered by Professor Moon, we decided to make our project with the scrolling function so that one fixed order can be set by us first. My partner, Christy suggested that we could design the scene under one specific story background so that we chose the movie Leon, the Professional in which the famous hitman Leon was killed in one explosion in order to keep the little girl Mathilda safe. After having the basic stricture of our project, we started data collecting. We collected the audios both by recording on our own and searching online. For the parts with characters talking, I found one of my friends in the theatre club who’s good at acting to help recording the Mathilda part. By this way, I hope listeners could feel the message we are trying to convey in the audio. I also used Audacity to add sound effects when editing the beginning sound and making the sound of the crowd as the background when the policeman is talking, etc. In order to make the project more dramatic, I edited both the beginning and ending audios with Audacity. I hope listeners would have the “whoa” feeling when listening. For the visual part, we didn’t spend much time. we found images online and photoshopped them.

For this project, I did all the coding and didn’t encounter any major problem because we were offered the coding template which helped us a lot. The only thing that troubled me during the process is that the audio started to play every time it detected that the “scrollPercentage” was larger than the threshold value while I only wanted it to play once the first time the percentage is larger than the threshold value. I talked to Professor Moon about it. He simply added one boolean function in js code and it worked. I remember using it last semester for interaction lab but didn’t think of utilizing it here. By defining true and false, the audio could only play once. Another small thing is that I was afraid that if the listeners scroll too fast so that different audios mix together so that I added an alert to ask them to scroll after finishing listening to each piece. For the recording part, it took some time but I was quite satisfied with the pieces. The Tascam and Audacity are not hard to use.

I think our project turned out to be similar to what we expected but the content is not that rich because we didn’t have much time and it is a bit difficult to gather relative audios for our project. I had one idea that didn’t achieve in the project, but I made an attempt in the project. I wanted to break every piece of audio down with every according visual element and pile them up to build a whole image of the crime scene, just like building puzzles. We utilized different elements and had the whole image but didn’t design it as I expected because it might take more time to design the visual elements and code. So we just focused on the audio part and kept others simple. If I have more time, I’ll add more audio to the page and probably work on the visual part.