[lojban] Japanimation? Lojbanimation.

["Matt Arnold" <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

I enjoy dreaming out loud at you about ways to spread interest in Lojban.

Why does the Klingon language enjoy such popularity? Because people
hear it spoken with subtitles in Star Trek and are captivated by the
setting that language creates.

Every time I go to a convention, there is usually an anime room.
Sitting in there watching the otaku enjoy subtitled animation from
Japan, I am impressed by how powerfully this medium spreads a foreign
language through other cultures. I think back to the anime conventions
I've visited and consider the classes on Japanese that they teach
there! An entire subculture exists online, called "fansubbing", for
amateur hobbyists to translate Japanese culture into English and other
languages before it is officially released.

Animation once required prohibitive amounts of time and money. But
with the advent of machinima, that's no longer true, if you're willing
to settle for relatively crude computer animation. Machinima is a
technique for recording a video game while you control it with a
joystick or mouse, and then dubbing your own voices onto the action.
It's as if the video game characters were being used as puppets. See
Wikipedia's entry on Machinima:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima

There now exist programs which exist for nothing but machinima. "The
Movies" lets you customize characters, props and backgrounds which you
can puppeteer to create your own film. Online virtual worlds such as
"Second Life" and "There", while they are used for far more than
machinima, are so customizable that they now serve as ideal platforms
for it. Google SketchUp is an incredibly easy 3D modeling program that
I have learned how to operate. It can be used to create avatars,
props, sets and other models to be imported into machinima software.

Hence I imagined Lojban's answer to Japanimation: "Lojbanimation" or
{lojbo skina}. An ideal source material would be a short story rather
than a novel. In it, the characters should have some reason to speak
an artificial language, rather than have English speakers inexplicably
speaking Lojban instead. Another ideal aspect would be a story
released under a Creative Commons license that allows free copying and
derivative works.

I know of no work that meets all these criteria unless we write one
ourselves. The best candidate I know of is "Fossil Games" by Tom
Purdom, although it's fully copyrighted. The characters live so long
that they learn several artificial languages, so it would be a minor
alteration to change the story to have them speak Lojban all the time.
The sets are easy to build because they're all either indoors or in an
empty Mars-like desert. The story has fascinating political drama,
hard science, eye-catching characters, and robot combat. It has a
crunchy technological coating and a chewy philosophical center which
would pull a viewer into the Lojban mystique and culture.

http://www.nemorathwald.com/purdom_fossil_games.htm

Much of the work could be distributed among multiple people who become
excited about this project. It would require:

1: finding or writing a story.

2: converting it into a screenplay format with dialog and voiceovers.

3: drawing storyboards.

4: translating the script into Lojban.

5: modeling the characters, props and sets in 3D.

6: puppeteering and recording the models in machinima software.

7: recording our voices acting the Lojban script.

8: editing it all together with music and English subtitles.

9: posting it to Youtube and Google Video.

10: submitting the link to BoingBoing.net where my friend Cory
Doctorow will blog the $#14 out of it.

11: welcoming the influx of newbies.

What do you think?

-epkat


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