I stand corrected: Alien Faces.
Sep. 25th, 2004 04:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupAt a garden party at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
denizsarikaya's place a few parties back, I was talking with some folks about the problems inherent in doing non-human aliens for movies and TV. What I like to think of as the 'face' problem. Alien aliens are going to have completely different ways of displaying emotions than we do.
Can you tell when a shark is happy or sad? They do convey emotional states via body posture, but humans have to learn the signals the hard way. We just aren't wired to interpret things the way that sharks display them. Most people can't figure out what signals a bear is giving, although they use almost the identical set that dogs use. (Then again, I know lots of folks who have trouble interpreting dog body language).
I pointed out that all of the 'aliens' on farscape have humanoid faces and use humanoid facial expressions to convey emotion. My opinion at the time was that you could not do a movie with truely alien aliens as protagonists, because no one would be able to identify with them. I've now changed that opinion.
I just read an article on the trouble people had making R2D2 into a protagonist in the first Star Wars movie. They had to have a faceless robot convey emotions, and they mostly succeeded. Now, one can argue that a human-built robot is going to be designed to push the right emotional buttons in humans, and so is an easier case than a true alien, but I don't think the Star Wars folks were thinking that. They put a trash can on legs, and then told the prop people to make it display emotions. All that was available were gross body movements (turning, shaking), the twitching of an optic sensor, and electronic beeps, but they managed to convey the right messages with the wrong tools.
That made me think that maybe there IS something that could be done for a bio-hard SF movie. ('Hard' in the biological/sociological/neurological sciences as well as the physics ones). If one assumes that the whole body-posture/facial-expression thing is a known problem in the SF setting then one may be forced to take classes in biological and cultural relatavism before being allowed to interact with aliens. Part of the training is to desensitize you to certain wrong clues that you will get from aliens, partly to learn how to 'broadcast' your emotional states in ways that alien hardwiring is meant to pick up, and partly to learn to interpret alien attempts to signal their states to us.
Thus, humans in the show may walk around with forehead color-patches that work as mood rings to help color-shifting aliens interpret our body language. Humans may also have to perform certain odd arm or hand gestures to mimic antennae gestures used by insectoids to convey feelings. By the same token, some aliens will emit mood-music to indicate their states, while others may actually wear little animorphic smileys that change in set ways to indicate emotion in an otherwise inscrutable being.
It would be a lot of hard work to make it all convincing, but it might be a bunch of fun as well!
denizsarikaya's place a few parties back, I was talking with some folks about the problems inherent in doing non-human aliens for movies and TV. What I like to think of as the 'face' problem. Alien aliens are going to have completely different ways of displaying emotions than we do. Can you tell when a shark is happy or sad? They do convey emotional states via body posture, but humans have to learn the signals the hard way. We just aren't wired to interpret things the way that sharks display them. Most people can't figure out what signals a bear is giving, although they use almost the identical set that dogs use. (Then again, I know lots of folks who have trouble interpreting dog body language).
I pointed out that all of the 'aliens' on farscape have humanoid faces and use humanoid facial expressions to convey emotion. My opinion at the time was that you could not do a movie with truely alien aliens as protagonists, because no one would be able to identify with them. I've now changed that opinion.
I just read an article on the trouble people had making R2D2 into a protagonist in the first Star Wars movie. They had to have a faceless robot convey emotions, and they mostly succeeded. Now, one can argue that a human-built robot is going to be designed to push the right emotional buttons in humans, and so is an easier case than a true alien, but I don't think the Star Wars folks were thinking that. They put a trash can on legs, and then told the prop people to make it display emotions. All that was available were gross body movements (turning, shaking), the twitching of an optic sensor, and electronic beeps, but they managed to convey the right messages with the wrong tools.
That made me think that maybe there IS something that could be done for a bio-hard SF movie. ('Hard' in the biological/sociological/neurological sciences as well as the physics ones). If one assumes that the whole body-posture/facial-expression thing is a known problem in the SF setting then one may be forced to take classes in biological and cultural relatavism before being allowed to interact with aliens. Part of the training is to desensitize you to certain wrong clues that you will get from aliens, partly to learn how to 'broadcast' your emotional states in ways that alien hardwiring is meant to pick up, and partly to learn to interpret alien attempts to signal their states to us.
Thus, humans in the show may walk around with forehead color-patches that work as mood rings to help color-shifting aliens interpret our body language. Humans may also have to perform certain odd arm or hand gestures to mimic antennae gestures used by insectoids to convey feelings. By the same token, some aliens will emit mood-music to indicate their states, while others may actually wear little animorphic smileys that change in set ways to indicate emotion in an otherwise inscrutable being.
It would be a lot of hard work to make it all convincing, but it might be a bunch of fun as well!
