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Arrival's Designers Crafted a Mesmerizing Alien Alphabet (2016)
- nickt 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20230129101101/https://www.wired.com/2016/11/arrivals-designers-crafted-mesmerizing-alien-alphabet/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230129101101/https://www.wired...
- aszantu 3y agolooks like a form of gallifreyan to me, except more like chinese than european
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago(2016)
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoHere's some more from a linguist and a bunch of discussion on Arrival's language (2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13967019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13967019
- SehajPasricha 3y agoThanks, this is great.
- siraben 3y agoIf the aliens from Arrival landed in 2023, perhaps we would be generating our replies with a finetuned Stable Diffusion model.[0] [0] https://github.com/siraben/heptapod-diffusion https://github.com/siraben/heptapod-diffusion
- bertman 3y agoThis is great! >especially if it involves confusing the words "weapon" and "tool" Ah man, this movie will always have a very special place in my heart.
- SehajPasricha 3y agoSame with me! Great movie.
- sateesh 3y agoIt is a good movie. But I feel the story it is based (from Ted Chiang) is superior. Some of the nuances in the story deals with (seeing life as a whole, inadequacy in conveying whole gamut of emotions, concepts in our day to day communication etc,) doesn't come out that well in the movie.
- deelly 3y agoInteresting, I watched movie before reading the story, and personally I liked movie more. Story is different in narrative and in the conclusion. Will be interesting to know is there a difference in a movie perception between peoples that read story first and people that come to movie without any idea what happens.
- kkylin 3y agoI guess this is one more data point: I read the story first, too, and liked it better than the film. The story ended with a certain ambiguity (in my mind, at any rate) that I took some time to think about, and which I enjoyed. The movie wrapped it all up a bit too neatly to my taste.
- neilparikh 3y agoI watched the movie first, but enjoyed the written story more (though I still thought the movie was great!). The big difference for me was the inclusion of the physics in the written story, and how it was connected to the linguistics.
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- deelly 3y agoAnd we will never know is there a error in Stable Diffusion generated images or aliens do not understand our answers...
- wsostt 3y agoThe team has a GitHub repo: https://github.com/WolframResearch/Arrival-Movie-Live-Coding https://github.com/WolframResearch/Arrival-Movie-Live-Coding
- suction 3y ago[dead]
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- CamelCaseName 3y agoI enjoyed Arrival and recently learned that the movie was based off a short story by Ted Chiang, "Stories of Your Life And Others". I recently read his other book, "Exhalation" and wholeheartedly recommend it.
- rmnclmnt 3y agoTed Chiang is an amazing author. If you like his novels, consider giving a try to "The Paper Menagerie an Other Stories" by Ken Liu
- ama5322 3y agoI liked the movie and enjoyed the visual pretext of the communication, although it always felt not very credible to me from a logical standpoint. I would expect two intelligent species intending and willing to communicate to form an increasingly complex communication scheme starting from basic principles. Of course, this wouldn't have translated into a decent plot by itself.. :/
- giraffe_lady 3y ago[flagged]
- juliusgeo 3y ago[flagged]
- ama5322 3y agoNot sure what to think of this, as in sarcastic sense...? It's not like we're discussing trite software, I was just discussing about the "plot device" here where the decoding of an arbitrary language with complex symbology is a central feature. Doesn't it feel "forced" to you in the same way action movies show absolutely unrealistic martial arts moves for the sake of entertainment, or watching most "hackers" in computer movies? Wouldn't you agree that starting form the absolute basics would be a much sound/quicker way to come to a unambiguous shared vocabulary instead of just showing complex blots to another species and expecting them to decode it? It's also especially odd to me that the somehow the host civilization is doing the decoding part. Considering contact from a supposedly more advanced civilization, I would almost expect the opposite to be true, where the aliens would likely take most of the burden of establishing communication (and probably already did so by watching/listening). But I get it.. I still enjoyed the movie (like I can still enjoy action movies or computer movies)...
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago> But consultations with linguists and graphic designers kept leading to fictional alphabets that Vermette says hewed too closely to familiar systems like hieroglyphics, or code. It felt too human. Then one night, Vermette’s wife, artist Martine Bertrand, offered to sketch some ideas. The next morning, Vermette came downstairs to find 15 inky logograms on the kitchen table. "I said, 'eureka.'" I mean it sounds like Martine was the one who invented it! Let’s talk with her!
- ricc 3y agoMaybe she just left some coffee stains by accident...
- motohagiography 3y agoFor me, one of the beautiful subtexts in the movie was Adams' remembrances of dreams of horses, where it wasn't explicit whether it was the aliens expressing the images to her, or she was summoning the feeling of communing with another being, using that experience as a tool to open her mind to what the beings were expressing to her. It captured the feeling of synesthesia very well. Between Arrival and Interstellar, the potential of movies to express incredibly complex ideas with new visual metaphors seems to finally be coming into form.
- wrp 3y agoEnjoyed the movie very much, but have issues with how Heptapod communication is portrayed. For one thing, they have two modes of language, purely verbal and purely written. Well, what do they do if they want to write down someone's speech verbatim, or tell someone verbally exactly what is written?
- mpalmer 3y agoI think it one point in the movie they explicitly say that there is no correlation between what an alien says and what they write. They further say that because it's not a transcription of speech, the writing is not "bound by time". Utterances have a start and an end, heptapod writing ipso facto does not. It's possible too that the alien utterances are purely gestural, and don't involve language in the same sense as the logograms.