Conlangery #112: The Conlanging film with Britton Watkins

Conlangery #112: The Conlanging film with Britton Watkins

Published: Mon, 07 Sep 2015 04:00:40 +0000 \

Content from the Conlangery Podcast is licenced as Creative Commons Attribution - Non Commercial - Share-Alike. You are free to copy, distribute, remix, and create derivative works from the show, so long as you give attribution, your work is not commercial in nature, and you also use a the same license on your own product. The same licence therefore applies to the following transcript.

Transcript

utterance-id1 mhm <unk> <unk> <unk> [noise] <unk> languages and the people aren't george carlin and sitting right across from me [noise] is william at us and right next to him we have written watching [noise] nice to be with you again i'm unemployed so um [noise] just uh for for listeners to be aware so this is the first time uh that we recorded a <unk> with my <unk> to me in any one else in the same room we always did it on <unk> even after i moved to to wisconsin but um there were doing this for a very special reason uh and it's that written and whose husband uh josh our here filming the bobcat so uh you can expect uh when the uh the the documentary uh <unk> right when that comes out you might have a few little snippets of <unk> uh so the most admitted it [laughter] it is pretty met uh yeah they were gonna try to be met uh you couldn't be much more met again those are pretty good so we had written on an episode ninety seven to talk about movies ten and more specifically the language um seeing on there for that um i know um for some reason britain decided that one stressful filming experience wasn't enough and he's going to make a documentary um about calling and calling here so why don't we start by you talking about this idea settled on your brain okay sure the well the idea of been carrying around for a while maybe eighteen months even two years to do it because i haven't seen a documentary on <unk> and i don't know why not because you know they're great books out there um their web sites that talk about <unk> their communities where people are doing <unk> and everything else seems to have a cold documentary some of them cooler than others but not <unk> and i find it super cool so i've wanted there to be one and you know i'm exploring this for the first time ah as a person who's been involved to making a science fiction film this is very very different the way you do it is different um the nature of creating are collecting the material is very different so it's another exploration for me [laughter] but i care a lot about <unk> and i've come to care very much about people who come on line so i wanted a fair and balanced documentary about <unk> so that's why i'm doing it the thing that um i like most about this project is that you are a <unk> here you are someone in the in the community and like even you know some of the the stuff that's out there like our <unk> book is very good but she's she's like an outsider community and she doesn't spend a whole lot of time with the hobby is <unk> which is something that you are focusing on right yes um and i i'm certainly not a part of what i've come to think of is the old guard of of <unk> you know i haven't been doing it for thirty years like a lot of the people who will be on our film have done but um but i've been doing it long enough to think that i can legitimately you say that i've done it and i've been involved in film projects that have it as a function of them and i am on the communities online at least some of them that that people are talking about their <unk> and they're <unk> and they're artifacts and other things all the time so i've come to know it yeah from the inside first so i want to talk about what i know from the inside as opposed to taking um a completely outside or you know i i will say that it's very important to me that this documentary being made for a general audience i'm not making this documentary to explain to <unk> about [laughter] um i want <unk> grandparents and their cousins and their children to be able to watch something for an hour and a half to two hours and go oh that's what mommy does oh that's what my niece does you know and and understand from the outside what it is kind of as an art form or phenomenon or an activity or a hobby or whatever it is that you call it for yourself i want a common kind of normal documentary viewing audience to be able to learn what it is the uh film instead of a book or an article in a newspaper or a bunch of pages on a website <unk> when did you make the first when did you shoot your first film for this well i i'm actually i'm still curious when was the moment you said yeah okay well that's that's um really easy to explain because i was off to japan in the spring of this year to do a project for a client a research project for a client and um kind of helping the client with their their business they're international business strategy for japan [noise] and i thought oh well when i get back from japan then i'll really start focusing on the documentary because the schedule in japan it was really busy too i mean it was [noise] tokyo and children running around and you know multiple interviews every day with all kinds of different people so i thought okay that's a lot to think about it one time i'll wait till i'm back from japan but then i realized l. c. c. six is gonna be happening in <unk> just days not even months but like days after i returned from japan [noise] so i thought okay i have to have a plane ticket i have to have talked to people already i actually have the permission of the l. c. s. to fill this thing i have to have all this over the place so i really had no choice but to then rush around before i even departed four tokyo and make it happen and i thought okay well if i'm doing that i might as well throw a camera in the back and a couple of other pieces of equipment in my carry on bag and shoot some people in japan so the very first footage that we shot ah was actually uh people who are either <unk> or <unk> adjacent in japan and it was me not even knowing how to use the camera properly and dealing with whatever fluorescent lighting we happened to have in there were him you know we might have beautiful japanese you know clay walls but then fluorescent light whatever was in the middle of the room just because i couldn't afford to carry proper lighting and whatnot so i started calling it together even in in my last trip to to tokyo and killed though and ended up with some fascinating people there so that even that was kind of exciting that i got usable stuff out of interviews in in japan and then after that it was just a world when of of two and a half days in <unk> l. c. c. six with calling us from all over europe in the u._s. and all the presentations and back and forth between uh hotel rooms and and the conference center so it just all the <unk> started [laughter] yeah that's interesting i knew that there is a <unk> in japan but there's very little communication between japanese governors and you're an english speaking yeah and i don't know that they that they the japanese calling or isn't necessarily think of it as a community the way that we think of the kind of trans atlantic european and and u._s. congress as a community i ask specifically about that in the interview specifically with um the individual who's most um you know most officially a calling or the people i interviewed and he said he really didn't engage in any kind of community like that he's aware of a few other people and the fame around their work with and people who <unk> but it doesn't seem organized and exactly the same way in necessarily what you would call a community i would definitely call what i'm a part of online uh community but i i wasn't able to enter i wasn't able to identify that i should say in japan and it'd be interesting are they creating languages for generally the same reasons that you're seeing and [noise] generally yeah i mean you'll you'll notice that there are a lot of languages whether they're fully grammatical or not um i'm not sure 'cause i haven't researched all of them but in a lot of anemic projects and other things um there are languages that pop up and you hear them all of a sudden and especially scripts they seem very fond of creating a constructed scripts to augment the [noise] the production design or the kind of visual design of anemia and other things so um there's a lot of that going on certainly but i don't know that all of it is quite as grammatical as has started to happen in the west <unk> well yeah it's definitely going on and you're saying that you you you can't be sure these are like actual online georgia's relaxes or something like that <unk> a lot of the things that i've even stumbled across just haphazardly because they're available net flicks now for example um i my my gas is that there's some kind of systematic thinking behind them but they're not what the three of us would call the <unk> with a very consistent phonology and grammar they may have worked out some fun logical things but not any grammatical things for example um and again this also happens outside of japan but i think there's <unk> japanese as japanese is very readily identifiable to japanese people it's not like the roman alphabet that's used for all kinds of different languages and you can put a slasher one letter or turn one upside down or backwards and all of a sudden it looks a little different with japanese you have to intentionally if you're doing something visual you have to intentionally come up with another script otherwise it can only be japanese that writing system is not use for any other language in that way [noise] um so i think they kind of have an affinity for making things seem a little exotic by coming up with unusual scripts and that may be again just flipping around roman letters or adding on some extra strokes to run the letters or whatnot but that happens a lot and and then there you know <unk> <unk> many more significant efforts as well in in games and um <unk> projects and other things but yeah this is a strip thing i have sort of notice but it's been hard 'cause at my japanese is it would be a nightmare trying to read the descriptions of these language to to to see how much is going on behind them apart from the script which sometimes in both sounds which are clearly know japanese oh yes yes the the bottom language um that was created for sick on among show <unk> stars is um the phonology is not japanese at all there are a lot of vowels and they're more focused on his son vowels and other things that are not remotely japanese although the language is ah imagine to be a very future evolution of japanese might become so the the um the off people who speak the language and in his world uh originated on earth in japan and then over for very long period of time their languages become something very different [laughter] but he did that um to make it interesting but he also did it because it gave him a basis to start with so he could just start very solidly and with japanese as it is now and not feel bad about that and also take a lot of um words and concepts and vocabulary and then through looking at the phonology overtime what might happen and applying ah rules to that he's come up with a very very [noise] he can basically use japanese grammar as it is today but change all of the words and and he also has a very different case system than the white japanese works today um it's a very proper con line and um and it's from many many years ago it's not something you it's been around for a long time so um we can look forward to the fact that he's working on a new book now and we should have maybe some more examples of that language and the not too far future [noise] and um why don't we move a little bit more into the continuing sure filming process uh uh not that you know the japanese stuff is very interesting but uh after you came back from japan mhm so you immediately go off ah <unk> right almost immediately and then you <unk> you interviewed some people there what was that process like in you know well that process was incredibly hectic because we were trying to leverage as much time camera time an individual people over the course of a conference that was already planned to be full over the course of two days in in the u._k. and very you know very interesting full um l. l. c. c. the way they always are the lengths christian conferences are always very full of interesting content so we were constantly kind of back and forth and this morning can we fit in three people and can you come at eight in the morning and ah josh was not there so allen tailor who's a good friend of mine who am i know because of the not be learning in speaking community um is great with a camera and ah we actually sat up in film individual interviews in allens or not in mind because he had enough space in his room that happened to be larger than mine so we we have people coming to his room we had set up our one light uh actually two lights that we just purchased from amazon dot <unk> dot u. k. because of all to just different i couldn't even take and i like i say and use them in in the u._k. so you know we we just kind of hooker cook we figured out how to do it and um it was hectic and we didn't get as much time with everyone as we would lie but it worked really well and i think you know josh as our director photography r._t._p. cinematographer was happy with the stuff that we got uh in allen is very technically confidence so we got very good thing and super interesting people um of all different ages we got men and women we got people from uh parts of europe that we wouldn't necessarily easily get if we were doing most of our filming here in the united states of course so um it was fantastic yeah another thing that i found interesting once you got the ball rolling is um i look at your list of executive producers and i know a lot of that sort of you know you give people that title and that's that has like marketing values that but you see <unk> peterson and christine flyer few people that have been on the <unk> last year and um when did those people get involved in like what you know what support and have you gotten uh i know that you've gotten lots of support from the community from you know everybody at least you know sharing sharing on search for media all your marketing stuff and all that [noise] um i by the time i went to the u._k. all of our producers um executive producers and uh associate producers had signed on uh-huh and we have david peterson david hello paul from er mark or current and christine <unk> and they all are not just there in name at all they're all actively contributing to the development of our narrative ideas um they're putting me or other members for helping me in touch with people to be interviewed um we're all coming up with ideas were all keeping our eyes open and our ears to the ground about new things that we bump into that we didn't know about before [noise] so they're all very actively engaged and um we've recently announce that we've got a very generous grant from the canadian government from um the canadian humanities research council and that it was only possible because christine is on the project uh she has experience with writing grandson getting grants for various um research related language and that sort of logical research related project so that very much because christine is on board and i contacted all of them independently instead i'm thinking about this film i'm thinking about doing it and this way for a general audience and to the person they all [noise] some of them right there on the spot the first time we talk but all within a day or two uh said yes that sounds like a great idea and i'm on board so that was very rare firming and yes because they all have worked on major films or other major entertainment franchises their name means something different to the media the general media than um than your typical i just started <unk> seventeen years ago and only people on face book are only people on his office or know about me yet they're different because because of their name recognition there are different in that way but [noise] but we all see ourselves as people who have <unk> and have that experience under our belt and it's something that we liked doing we enjoy it we think the communities important we think <unk> as as an <unk> a human endeavor as important so we're really all kind of super sync up in that way about why we want to make this project and why we want them they make it successful their name recognition will be most important i think once the film is made or almost made and we're really talking to the mainstream media about getting the word out that it exists um but for right now they're in the guts of it with me figuring out who should be interviewed and we <unk> eventually we'll be having you know blood sweat and tears over the editing process which will be very very challenging but they they're going to be involved you know they're they are involved in their continue to help mhm so what spend your most sort of unexpected lead at this point we're <unk> oh you should go talk to whoever um that's a good question i haven't thought about that i mean i things you like who knew this was going well i i mean there's probably a lot of that but there's a lot of that i think i think a lot of what's going on in terms of just going on i i know about because of you know watching face book and and knowing about uh does things i've discovered super interesting things that i had no idea about like the fact that beatrix potter had her own coded alphabet and kept a journal in it for fifteen years i i knew absolutely nothing about that and i learned about that by talking with a professor at brigham young university who ended up choosing to not be interviewed on camera but she shared lots of interesting things with me about that and the fact that that was interesting to her and she discovered it out of the blue so there are many things like that that um have been fascinating to me um and one of the things that is important to me and this film as to show a general audience that there's a lot of stuff going on that <unk> adjacent it's not <unk> proper the way that the three of us would would call <unk> but it's playing with scripts it's playing with language you know even if you're not making up a new language if you ride a poem light job or walk you for example or you throw a line in a movie like it too you know you are playing with language even if it doesn't have a full grammar and the whole uh flushed out phonology behind it and there are lots of people who fall on a continuum um in my family for example we have long before i learned any kind of a foreign language at all [noise] we use the word <unk> to mean something that like not <unk> it's kind of gross maybe sticky doesn't belong there on that that corner of that show but if you will that needs wiping off and we call things that are old and <unk> you know so we had these wars in my family that we use and i just discovered in my native south carolina about a week ago interviewing a nineteen year old con lying or who has a very kind of similar profile coming out of south carolina that i do when i got his mother on camera talking about the fact when he first started you know as a young child doing alphabet that nobody in the family could read and all that she she can fast that they kind of have their own private linguistic things that go on in their family they have phrases that they use that are meaningful only to them and they have nicknames for each other that don't sound like they came out of an english language nick naming paradigm um and again they're not that one of the children in the family has a very interesting con line that's based on you know a combination of news speak and <unk> and <unk> other thing that's and that's it clicked big it is quite a click tickets a very interesting he's basically made a language that would be very useful in his mind to uh tie radical dictators you know so um and he he met uh john <unk> for the first time while we were there filming you know 'cause he he's been studying in school for over a year now but he'd never met drawing before so but he is this is his family and they play around with language in an interesting why even though english is the only language spoken in the family i think there's an english i think it <unk> who says interesting things to say about creoles but also language invention assertion and i just really changed my thinking and it's something common should consider and just people thinking about language is it language right we have all these different metaphors for language and if we go with a biological metaphor language is not a organism in as a species yeah every single one of our brains [noise] has a fairly difference instance a different individual <unk> families have their own and increasingly wide you know the <unk> and <unk> and uh it it it makes for a very good mother of four four four hour language works because you have you know did you like ripping into a larger language group or speech group and you can have the the weird things like dialect continuum and stuff right we have the the <unk> family english has these you know slightly blue or feathers on this [laughter] i think i don't know really interesting way of thinking about it in a way of thinking about things like dialects that useful model and he's thinking thinking about what you you talk about with um cuddling adjacent thing is i i sort of see like two different attitudes occur within the community which is one attitude and honestly sometimes i'm i'm like this is <unk> is like the specific thing where your goal is trying to make something that resembles like a full fully usable human language and then there's other people who actually like whew include some of the <unk> adjacent things <unk> and and and stuff and say it's all it's all good stuff and we shouldn't put up barriers so you've already you know talked about how in the film you're going to talk about some humbling you jason things but like where do you really you know staying on like those [noise] position well i let me explain why i think it's important in the film to include <unk> adjacent things i in in the research that i do i often come across um [noise] the fact that if i'm testing a product idea or something like that for a large tech company it's important to figure out in interviewing people what they see as crossing the line and being being officially this is the thing and this is not the thing so we need counter examples of things [noise] that um for <unk> for example would not qualified maybe as a <unk> [laughter] but we're making this for a general audience so in my mind uh in order to have a <unk> you need to go through the process that most <unk> go through and that is figure out a phonology figure out grammar figure out um morphology and syntax all these things and start putting the pieces together you're doing all this very intentionally and you you probably know what most of those things are you probably understand what the word grammar means you know you probably you might even understand what syntax names by the time that you start or at least by the time you're two months into it you've learned caught sin taxes because you've had to go off and learn something about linguistics most people anyway i need to do that so i want to show people though who don't do this at all [noise] who don't have a family where like where i do or <unk> um that it's not that uncommon for people to do that and if you if you consider this a continue on that start somewhere on the continuum of language play let's call it language play or or <unk> play somewhere on that continue on you cross the line into what david peterson or george carlin would call <unk> you know you cross the line and you're really firmly in this part of the bell curve that's <unk> and in somewhere way down at the right and if you're moving left right you have <unk> or you have something that is really really undeniably uh multi year <unk> projects something that's a big epic important <unk> officially what token was doing was <unk> for example i mean you officially have that [noise] but before you get there it's not that strange to for an young child to make up a private alphabet and start keeping notes in his or her native language in that private alphabet sometimes that crosses the line on a continuum over into what i would consider officially <unk> but it doesn't always and just because the child is doing that or if it if you start doing it as an adult for some reason [noise] not that strange not that oddest thing certainly not deserving of the kind of direction that <unk> often get when they throw there are are they throw their hobby or they throw their interest out into some kind of public domain like sharing with friends and family and face book i mean everybody is hurt my energy and learning arabic why haven't you spent all of these hours learning russian well a lotta people are learning russian in arabic already they already have learned russian an arabic and they've kind of mood beyond that and they haven't yukon script that's a mash up of the arabic script and <unk> it it doesn't mean that what they're doing is that weird strange mhm so i wanna i wanna show <unk> as a as a certain segment of playing with language that's much more advanced um i have one of the things it's incredibly surprising to me is that i have discovered people who not only have a con lying but who are fluent in a <unk> who don't know anything about linguistics they don't they're not able to describe their language as it plays out top a logical you know they are not able to tell you if they're alum worse than their language or not but they're fluid and <unk> and they can make songs in it and they can talk to their friends than animals in it whether those friends on animals understand or not they really are flew it so that's a fascinating phenomenon to me that you can have a monolingual speaker of a language who is who invented it in her his own head um and that that actually happens and it's documented now in the real world so um i found all kinds of fascinating things but that language play started with out any formal training in linguistics or maybe even any ability to go off and research it on the internet because you might maybe didn't have internet access you know when it started happening so i do think that there's a continuum and i put it too and you know <unk> and oh somewhere on that continue um i mean it's not officially what i would call <unk> but it's relevant and to people who've never thought about this before it's it's out there in in <unk> in a movie could be confused with <unk> so i want people to understand if they're learning about <unk> in a documentary for the first time a lot of what you're hearing in film if it's just a line or two is nothing but <unk> and that's fine but it it could be something much more than that uh <unk> or could have spent thirty hours or thirty days or thirty years building a call on line that does have a full grammar and electric on a fifteen thousand words but yet you only heard <unk> you know you only heard a tiny tiny fragment of it that doesn't mean that it's good or bad it just means that you may not know the whole story and once you've seen a documentary on <unk> you may be interested to go forth and find out did i just hear <unk> fantasy movie or did i hear something that it's deeper than that and if i'm curious about it can i go learn what the phonology of that language it is it documented on line somewhere in a p._d._f. or on a website i think a lot of some at least humbling adjacent behaviors israel and they call them our gateway stick on i mean yeah for me i started out preoccupied with writing systems codes either and <unk> and i got a crappy middle water colored russian i was writing i was brutal <unk> hung glued into being able to write english that i could write things for myself [laughter] right [laughter] and [laughter] and now of course i don't do anything with constructed scripts at all because i'm a terrible designer but that just set up uh the beginning of an interest in language that kept and eventually you know leads to call me so yeah i think that's interesting sort of becoming adjacent <unk> interesting to think of it that way well making the film you know because i if you if you you can look i can look at a constructed script and it's beautiful and it's exotic i've no idea whether it's used to write the english language if i don't have information about it we we interviewed simon <unk> from um from <unk> at l. c. c. six and you know he's chosen to include con scripts in in <unk> because he sees them you know she judges them based on how relevant and interesting they are and once that he perceives as good he puts he puts up there and it doesn't matter whether it's an alternate script for writing korean or an alternate script writing english if it's an interesting beautifully designed conscription puts it up there so i as a con linger can't tell whether a beautiful script has a language behind it or not but i see beauty in it and i see play that his language related in wanting to do a script there's all kinds of a stomach writing um we're gonna have people in the film who know that they're writing is not meaningful but they choose to do writing as opposed to some other kind of design i mean they could be doing designs that look ab original or they could be doing designs that look from outer space by aliens but instead they're doing writing that looks like it might be native to africa or they're doing writing that looks like it might be native to mars or something beyond mars um as opposed to just doing designs they choose for it to look like writing and the fact that people who are literate or possibly even illiterate heard used to sing riding around them all the time can look at it and know are not know whether it's uh uh uh a meaningful a script that in itself is interesting enough to me to include it as calling adjacent <unk> in film in the process yeah i do as you say what a what you've done so far and i know you have even more [laughter] recording going on you or nowhere near the end of this uh just a filming process and i want to get back to that in a moment what's the most unexpected thing you run across um and and what is something that maybe that you when you were going in you are sort of expecting to see but then it or so very little uh [noise] one of one of them most unexpected thing i mean i was literally dumbfounded by this to the point that i i just i almost couldn't even function is the work of steven travis untapped necessary um you can go find a lot of examples of steven stuff on line now just at <unk> dot com but he has a body of work that is is con lining and its cons script thing in the extreme i i knew that <unk> visually beautiful because i've seen a few examples and i knew that there had been some examples displayed at a at a now see see but i had no idea no idea that there were eight thousand glass and that <unk> the language the spoken language is beautiful and that it has this history of just even writing like diary injuries journals and things that look like they belong in the collections of the most important museums in the world you know i just i don't know i was dumbfounded by his work and the fact that parents simon is fluent in san deck um it having been developed only in his head the way that it was and the fact that he writes in his script fluently just effortlessly and kind of lives in his language was very surprising to me um [noise] just there's so many things all the time that our surprising to me there i discover that there are projects that i didn't know existed um i stumbled across things over the years and thought oh that looks interesting but i forgot to bookmark at our forgot to go back to it and now i'm talking to people about the genesis of these projects or the fact that they were much bigger than i knew that they were were were going to learn a lot uh over the course of this weekend about <unk> and i know i know very little about it and m. a. r. barker and by wednesday of next week i'm going to know a lot about all of that and it's i think very very important um maybe as big as anything that got left behind in officially documented by token you but i don't know yet i but i do know now that it has the potential to be that big and that i really didn't know that i should be paying attention to him [laughter] and it happened to decades ago i mean it's not something that somebody has been doing in the past three years on face book and his super well documented on the internet um even the even the ball rolling language <unk> flourished with its own kind of fan community and there were web sites and people had dictionaries up in in about our own <unk> if you speak japanese it's called optical in japanese um but those sites are not up anymore they're not maintained anymore so it flourished as a language and now it's not in the the popular imagination the way it was i was just shooting um very old examples of the desert alphabet at brigham young university in the special collections there and it now because of you know code is have the potential to flourish again people are making fun sure using it for people who don't know what the desert oath of it is um one of [noise] bringing young i think it was in his period um around the same time the eighteen hundreds there's there's a passion for reformed english spelling system some which looks very much like english but with some changes so radically different one of those was created within the mormon church and use <unk> produced the mormon um book mormon was transcript incidents language um we have diaries is really interesting um historically it gives us some insight into how he loses perhaps at the time mhm and someone did holyfield work using um the desert who also against us and it was a <unk> covered that right he yeah he doesn't work on it i don't know he uncovered it or he he he found the grammar that somebody that he was doing work on uh yeah he he found well the journal uh yeah who was an avid fan of learning in using the the script and he happened to also be a missionary to the hopi so okay that's you know that's the connection between um they're being hopi recorded <unk> from the time period in the script and and english also you know there's a there's a variation in um in english vowel tracking that was relevant to the english of of the british isles and the east coast and not so much a function of even the english that was spoken in utah at the time but you see that there was there were still these ghosts of vowels that had cold last um mm from between the east coast and and the salt lake city valley so um yeah it's fascinating stuff that that makes it both <unk> adjacent and potentially important for linguistics you know there's all kind of overlap one thing i want to ask you [noise] you've talked about you interviewed a few non <unk> specifically i'm i'm interested in you did interview <unk> mhm who is he's an actor who performed in a con line that presume i presume he didn't really understand i actually am interested in how i'll be interested in when i watch the movie in that perspective to someone who who's who's also outside and is is sort of you know <unk> through that you know true you know it was his job basically um like what what what interesting things came out of that or out of that interview yeah typically well i mean he did say and we even included uh because we thought it was important in in our promotional our first really public promotional video for the project he he it was daunting to him i think when he got the part you know he actually um perform part of the <unk> to get the park you know to to come across as fierce enough and whatnot so he understood the importance of presenting a different cultural outlook to these casting [laughter] why not to get the park um but he didn't realize that all the dialogue absolutely every word that he would speak would be in ducks rocky and then when he came to realize that it was like oh wow this is exactly what i knew i was signing up for but hey why not and you know this is great so he committed to working with david recordings and just go doing it full blast and he says on camera for us and very genuinely authentically without any prompting from us but it made the character i mean understands that <unk> is not exactly the same character in terms of authenticity in real isn't for the audience if he's not speaking or grammatical language that is it is consistent across episode an episode and seeing after seeing [noise] and he understands that his accent being the real one in the authentic one while <unk> is flawed because she's learned just rocky is the third or fourth language or whatever language it is er that that that lands authenticity <unk> fans so totally without learning about you know any kind of <unk> of rocky and <unk> you know <unk> he probably doesn't know that <unk> duct rocky don't consider a duck to be animate you know because it's such a small animal but that doesn't matter he committed to learning the line the way they were prepared for him and he understands that they're being grammatical and being proper and being done by a proper calm lying or like david um is really important to to alternatives today so that's that was nice to know that he understood i i'm i'm glad to hear that that's uh that's that's something that you realize that i hope that i think that is something that's spreading a little bit through the film industry if the evidence um more and more films looking for <unk> is is anything to go by m._t._v. show and <unk> shows <unk> video games and they're all kinds of as the internet and other technological innovations more entertainment and the way we spend our non money producing time into other activities they're more and more and more opportunities for genuine deep authentic constructed languages to find themselves in into <unk> find themselves in the authenticity paradigm [laughter] the authenticity uh layer of a production whether it's a game production um william has a lot of experience with that or a film or a t._v. show or a graphic novel or anything else that has the potential to use language in a world building fashion that makes it bad or you know that makes it deeper that makes it more interest and it's such a <unk> i mean [noise] this is a problem and i'm thinking about this problem because you're here interviewing us for stuff is what is the best metaphor of existing art form <unk> and it's very hard to come up with one that really applies why be because the the marketing one of the marketing people for the tar but he missed david talk to an industry group and an online you can see you're talking about the way in which having a language and letting the fans learn that language is a way of engaging an intellectual or entertainment property as well and good set design doesn't do that although college players try um but it's not like here's the pattern for dinner <unk> that's not being given out to be the yeah the costumer [laughter] here's have you made the swords or more than the rate none of that as being given out yeah um but uh <unk> is a completely different way to get into um banned them mhm and whatever right people winning as bronco are still motivated by an idea simply not the same it's banned in but something that makes people passionate language provides an economy provides another way for them to interact with that that i don't think of any other part of the production doing apart from somebody watching the thing over and over and over again and and more than that like fully appreciating icon laying more than a lot of other <unk> requires a different kind of effort let 'em different kind of intellectual effort then other forms of art like yes i could i can study art history and and art and understand upper costs are painting better than uh somebody from up the street with somebody from off the street can walk in and look at it and yet the full experience with a painting you know somebody you know sitting in their movie theaters that seat listening to not be they can get a little bit of the experience of what the language sounds like mhm but that's about it that's about all you can do without going in and starting and starting to analyze examples and trying to find materials on the grammar and all that stuff they do it in the movie right where they're trying to explain will will not be coming in is greedy and what isn't reading means so the intersection between culture and language was certainly brought up and yeah and considering everything else that it up on the cutting room but lord i'm i just you know you're right most people just going to be a decoration but i'm saying i living we above me who decide to engage more yeah and there's <unk> there are different levels <unk> so if you have a franchise you have a property that has a legitimate con lying behind it with alexa kind of four hundred words were four thousand words i mean it it <unk> in most cases for most people are gonna be fans of that franchise it doesn't matter whether it's four hundred words or forty words in some cases but but if it has a beautiful or soccer feet if part of the language are interesting um unusual takes on maxims or or cultural uh approaches to things if you have something as i connick at live long and prosper [noise] then you get fans who are never going to learn the proper phonology they're never going to learn um the the grammar behind um what has been kind of really understood as the grammar of these <unk> you know for for a live long and prosper which is the first kind of an article on screen examples that we really had um [noise] they don't care that perhaps toyotas playing a verbal role in that sense but they really might want it tattooed down there she's fine [laughter] and if they really might want something very personal written in very proper <unk> grammar in a band <unk> around there upper arm something about their grandmother who was very very important to them and they want it to be grammatical and they want to learn how to pronounce what that tattoo says correctly they don't need to learn any other sounds out of <unk> that are not in their tattoo but they want to know how to tell people they made it <unk> or their first love her when they take their slave often there it is exactly what it says and why it says that and why they chose to do it in ten or so they're all kinds of levels engagement and the same way there's a continuum for me [noise] of <unk> i'm calling adjacent things there are people wanting to engage in different levels and i don't see how you can go wrong with starting out with the proper con lying and maybe they're only twenty five people in the world who can speak it fluently but they're probably twenty five hundred people in it who can quote two or three maxims and <unk> that happened to be grammatical and then there might be twenty five thousand people who have tattoos on themselves into a script because it's beautiful and it matches the way the language works really well all day every day they rip peterson is getting <unk> for people with asking for protects you had to translate oh you <unk> so far behind all you have to work that i've been doing voluntarily <unk> [laughter] <unk> [laughter] you're getting out and that was all kinds of stuff people understand because i send everybody a disclaimer i think this is not <unk> in the sense that you understand candidates city with the star trek franchise i mean i'm like this one day c._b._s. or paramount may decide okay we're publishing definitive book on the <unk> and it may be done by some person who has absolutely nothing to do with me but that doesn't matter to a lot of these people they they they see that what they're getting is there is a fan base who understands these words that are being incorporated into their tattoo [noise] and the the fan base um who loves star trek because they find the designs beautiful have embraced it and they're making jewelry out of it and they're getting touches and they're doing all kinds of other stuff because they craved that attachment to their franchise into the other people in the community who also love the french all right i think that's where i i think yeah you get a situation where the entire language is this <unk> rather than in particular word [laughter] he's a sign of i'm a member of this group right there are many many many many many many many many many many many people yeah who knows it not be not because they're interested in producing a language fluently but say identify with this community that has yeah mhm um around us and not many entertainment properties arouse the sort of devotion as one of the rings or star trek or wherever retarded these days [noise] didn't like the other thing that's important to <unk> i think there's some saying also going on now with the modern franchises in the way economics work with entertainment these days that has parallels too ah italy many hundreds of years ago when you needed a patron you need a patron who has the money who have the time the interest and the patience if you want something that is going to be hanging on a museum wall five hundred years later you know you need you there's a certain kind of pairing that used to go on in that that mentality and that's happening today with with con lining in some cases with entertainment franchises and some people end up being attached as the official humbling are working on those things and then other people don't and there are initiatives with the job sport at the <unk> and other things for that to happen and then there's just a random chaos of the universe and which somebody's going to call the head of the department in linguistics and somebody who's already there who's already doing <unk> on top of teaching a three hundred level of course in in linguistics that involves <unk> um it's it's gonna end up interviewed for that and doing it i mean that's just it's a part of the you know the free if you will remember what's going on but if you one thing is for sure that if you have done what you're capable of doing if you have designed to what you're capable of doing and you put it out there and you've talked about it and all of your colleagues and all of your friends and all of your family knows that you're doing it and you're proud of it you're not ashamed of it you're not hiding away in a closet you know with a tiny light on developing your con script [noise] um the more you have it out there and the more visibility you have the more likely it is that some patron it's going to stumble across you if it's one of your goals with your <unk> to be attached to an entertainment franchise or to do it professionally even if you're even if even if that was a single project that you did in your life and it was particularly um meaningful to you that that can be okay i think they're not going to be a whole lot of david peterson's out there who that's all that they do i mean that's just that's not they're not a lot of rent branch out there either you know they're not a lot of people who end up just able to live off of their passion but that doesn't mean that you can't integrated into every day of your life and every facet of your line uh we've just spent all this time with trend pearson who [noise] who takes even like small just random happenings in his life and takes those and transforms those into memories by by turning them into some kind of artifact or object that has attachment to his world view or his eat there any language and he chooses oh well this particular thing happened in this way so i'm going to take this script that's that i associate with these <unk> these words at this these phrases and <unk> they are going to be a part of this physical artifact that is going to live longer than i do you know if it's if it's properly taking care of and it's gonna be a memory for the time that i'm alive and then it'll be a physical thing and i'm using it as a platform for carrying my language b._m._i. script into the world beyond my death even i mean if you can find meaning in that and doing that you you can find all the meaning you need to do con lying you know you don't need a hollywood production behind you to have that kind of meaning if if you find your way and you're really really happy with yourself and activities that you do that can you can leave your con lining into every minute of every day of your life how long have we been we've been talking for quite a while so [laughter] <unk> question yeah okay so you had been traveling all over and will continue to be traveling and how many hours of film you have and they can we haven't count it honestly we haven't found it i mean [noise] i said the <unk> follow the question is the documentary unless it turns into some horrible are so much time again to four hours is going to be between an hour and a half two hours [noise] <unk> yeah do you have plans to make use of interesting stuff it's just couldn't be fit into the narrative structure of the i i would say we have a goal to do that i mean plans would mean that ark i can articulate for you exactly why we were going to do and i can't yeah because it depends on [noise] crowd funding that we haven't done yet it depends on the possibility that some patron franchise might come across this project accidentally or we might reach out to them and say we've got something much better than we even thought we were going to have and are you interested in making it an exclusive and becoming a distribution platform globally for it we don't know yeah exactly what what will happen but we are going to take probably what will be between a hundred and fifty to a hundred and seventy five maybe even two hundred hours of footage and cut it down into a film that is absolutely not longer than two hours because if it's longer than two hours in his <unk> unwieldy <unk> for the audience right so it will probably be roughly an hour and a half an hour and forty five minutes long and editing that down is going to be extremely challenging what we are doing in order to know that we can supplement some of that cutting room quote unquote click cutting room floor stuff is a book project which guess who had signed up to be the editor for it that would be me yes [laughter] that's right [laughter] agreed to take this stuff that we absolutely don't feel we can part with and put it into a companion books to the film so that's one of the things that were going to do and then for all the other precious tidbits that are we really lend themselves more towards video we have the option for bonus materials on d._v._d.s and blue raised we have the option for little mini videos on the website for the project or possibly even depending on how licensing requirements might work out they might even be able to go up on you too i mean i don't we don't know yet but we know that we have lots of precious stuff all of which is not going to fit into a film that's an hour and a half two hours long and we're thinking about what that is i mean jokingly we we were either even talking the other day about well this is the <unk> that can be a for a minute [laughter] certainly two hundred hours of coddling documentary could end up in three and a half or fails instead of one so we don't know yet what we're going to do with all of it but you're you're where we're going to treat it with the respect that deserves men do the best that we can with the the patronage the resources that we have available to us this potty cast is minimally edited which i'm sure you you <unk> relies <unk> having been on there and then probably listen to yourself [laughter] that's so i can't imagine taking a hundred and fifty a hundred and seventy five hours of footage and cutting it sound too less than two so neither neither can i i'm not going to do it josh is going to do yeah that ain't josh is going to do it because he has an experience with editing he's also going to do it because this film is for a general audience not for <unk> right so i definitely and the rest of the producers will definitely um have some say in in the final edit but the first past the first major path that this film is seventy five to eighty to eighty five percent done kind of pass we're going to trust josh as in the mode the men are of a traditional edit or um to make some really tough decisions and that means that not every thing that a con linger would necessarily put into this film is going to be in this film but it does mean that the broad structure the cure ration or all happening by <unk> i mean i'm figuring out the bulk of all questions that are asked on the film not josh but he's been going to take what an <unk> audience but intellectually stimulated and interested audience would want to see and put that in the first major caught and then there will be lots of national county in tears and like eventually hopefully maybe by to spring of twenty six chain uh we will have a movie that's ready for a general audience to watch and i am ninety three point ten percent sure that uh <unk> audience is also going to find this movie really really interesting well we'll we'll be watching that and ah you know william as doing your book i i'll be willing to do whenever i can at least i can do promotions and applied cats as you know as small as our audiences hey if you under <unk> yeah that's a little bit of extra you mentioned the kick starter we yeah i don't know yeah it might be <unk> i don't know what platform are going to use yet um because of the grant and because of some timing associated with the ground and waiting for that and even because of the fact that we are essentially a crew of to flying around on airplanes you know sometimes eighteen hours between flights um we we only we have limited resources to make that happen but we are going to have some intern power and some other stuff because of the grants that will help and we're in the process of beginning to start that an organized that so um we had hoped that the the kicks daughter or they indigo campaign or whatnot might be running already um but it's definitely coming before [noise] before the end of the year and probably before we get too deep into the fall [laughter] okay so please be on the lookout for that and if you want the project to be bigger and bigger and more and more and you want all those hours of extra footage and what not to be available in some kind of format please come help us in support us because that that'll be a part of making that happen all right um well i guess we'll need to uh wrap this up i will say you know if there are clips from this episode showing on the <unk> i will you know no to our listeners there's this uh this is very very different from the way it usually do it [laughter] really i am my own house in front of my laptop with a microphone in my face and the you know william is over here probably staring at a computer after i'd rather than you know the three of us sitting in a chair but this is this is very nice and i kinda wish i could have people you know all in the same place so i could get body language and <unk> we need a patron to give them lots to our patriotic as we can fly people in for <unk> yes yes yes yes ah patriotic dot com slash <unk> for that you know we uh we don't have a whole lot of money and we have a little bit well you need to set badger up as the official mascot and then you know yeah it'll do almost anything for a cat [laughter] every cat is sitting on my lap if he wants to the cat can be sitting on my lap for all episodes <unk> [laughter] <unk> put such as a as a milestone goal but anyway [noise] all that aside <unk> show much britain for heading up this this project and doing the the the <unk> movie honestly this is something that i want to do for a long time but i had no idea like how to get it done and how to fund it so the fact that we have someone who has experience doing film uh and especially your husband has has has ah experience doing the editing josh over here um who's been pointing cameras out of the whole time moving wanting hammer around [laughter] side to side [laughter] um [laughter] uh it's it's um it's really great i think and i think it's it's a really great project uh where the colleen community and get the idea of coming out there more [noise] i really well i'm very appreciative to the to the hard cast for being a part of it and this and that away [laughter] letting us talk about it but also uh bring to be to show that [noise] you know who who you are them yet and all your voices that they don't necessarily know what you look like so right so we're spreading the news i want to do with the film and by doing it this way we got a little bit more news out there so there we go thank you [laughter] all right and ah thank you britain and i'm going to say [noise] become [noise] thank you for listening to con [noise] you can find our archives insurance act calmly or not [noise] support us on patriotic patriotic dot com flashed on line or [noise] you can also find this on baseball quarter and <unk> those are hungry and if you would like to hear your timeline features on the top of the show [noise] you can look at our [noise] trivia has the [noise] for what you translate how to sing [noise] online or he's <unk> provided by some language creation society and our music just by know divide [noise]

Tags

  1. Conlangery Podcast
  2. Podcast
  3. conlang
  4. documentary
  5. language
  6. linguistics
  7. movie

Conlangery Podcast/Conlangery 112 The Conlanging film with Britton Watkins (last edited 2017-09-09 23:41:12 by TranscriBot)