Some days I wish it were the kind of slog where you hit something with a bat and it’s gone and you’re done with it, but this is the kind of long seemingly unending slog where you try to bargain with it, reason with it, plead with it.. then you just get back into it and keep doing it because that’s what’s going to happen and there’s no escaping it.
So any time I have the thought of “Let’s just make this in English, seriously, it’s not worth spending eight hours every weekend trying to chip away at this apparent mountain of creating fictional speech”, I eventually come around and just get on with it. Of course it’s worth it. It’s worth it because the end effect is going to be listening to two folks having a conversation in a language that has never existed before. It’s going to be properly alien. Richly alien, even. The best sort of alien.
Still, it’s hard work. It’s possible that Ktish’s language is going to be the longest slog in the whole of pre-production. So many ideas, so many decisions, so many takes required to get the tongue muscle memory primed and working right. Ktish’s language is going to be the only one in the series with retroflex consonants in it, that’s guaranteed. The next speaking character (in the second episode, a long way off at this rate) gets a language with clicks – they’re easier for me to do and most importantly they sound totally awesome.
I’ve started cataloguing the actual translated sentences with numbers. This means I can check how nouns and verbs and affixes behave “in the wild” to keep usage consistent. It also means that if I’m really burning to change a word, I can see where it’s been used, whether the line of dialogue that uses it has already been recorded, etc. That’ll be useful, even though accounting work like that is always boring. It pays off.
The grander overview is a little disappointing though: there’s not even forty lines of dialogue in Ktish’s special language, and I’m already three weeks into the language build but only about halfway done. Some of those lines are several sentences each, I suppose. Some of them I can probably cut or rewrite – more bargaining for less work. As long as the story’s still there once I’ve finished rearranging words.
Making such slow progress is a little bit disspiriting. I’m rusty at this stuff and languages take a long time to build right – and by right I mean build in such a way that they’re still optimally useful as a production property going ahead. There are dictionaries broken down by part of speech, there are notes on the grammar.. so many spreadsheets.
So yeah. It’s a slog. The bad kind. That said, it’s perfectly possible that when the production design stuff really kicks in that I’ll be absolutely nostalgic for the language stuff.
At least with language stuff I basically know what I’m doing. I’ve never built environments before, and I haven’t really designed them. Writing and backstory have come to the rescue however, mainly in the form of of inspiration about the kind of stuff Ktish would have sitting around his house. I’ve decided an electric mushroom farm is definitely going to be one of them. There’s also the question of what Ktish’s house even looks like, how it’s laid out, what sort of techniques and approaches Ktish would use to make himself a place to live. Originally I had him living in a low-cost apartment block but at the moment he’s living.. well.. I’m not going to say yet. It may still change. 🙂
Meanwhile, on the drive to and from work, I’ve been learning about cognitive linguistics and prototype theory thanks to the text-to-speech feature on my daggy old-school Kindle. Instant audiobook. Love it.
Anyway, I’m far enough into pre-production now that I’m looking back at all the ground I’ve covered and there’s no thought in my mind of stopping, and not much lasting thought given to down-scoping. Yeah, I may have rewritten the first episode a bit again but only because I was explaining stuff like crazy instead of leaving expositional gaps. Yeah I’ll probably be re-editing the dialogue next time I have Reaper open so I can have more pregnant pauses as well – the talking whizzes by so fast, like I’m terrified of silence or something. Hopefully the pacing and dialogue problems can rinse out during the animatic stage. I’m trying not to think about how far I’ve got to go before I hit that. Shouldn’t be too much longer, but if it is, eh, put it down to experience.
Right now, where I am now, it’s like looking back at the foothills of a mountain – I can’t see the end of the climb yet, but a) I know it’s up there, b) I’m far enough from having begun to have got over my fear of climbing mountains and c) I have only an academic idea of what’s in store. But I’m optimistic, definitely. 🙂
