Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/765720
82 P E R S P E C T I V E | J A N UA RY / F E B R UA RY 2 0 1 7 Everything that was presented to us felt a bit too human, even when totally invented. The goal was to give the audience the same fascination and emotion as they had seeing the spaceship for the first time: strangeness, beauty, attraction and danger. The language needed to belong to an alien world to help support the story. When the aliens first reply to Louise, a reasonable interpretation of their ink language should feel as though it could also be a threat, a skunk- like defense mechanism. Nobody should really know what it is, and if it is language, quite impossible to decipher. We decided to reverse engineer the written language and start with aesthetic aspects first. We would figure out how it actually works as a second step. The circular coffee-stain-like ink blobs that we called Top: A classroom location at HEC, a French-language business school in Montréal, where Louise Banks is invited to teach the Universal Language brought to Earth by the aliens. Above, left and right: The deconstruction of a logogram graphic by Aaron Morrison, used for the scene where Louise teaches the Universal Language at a university. Santa Cabrini Hospital, a location in Montréal, is where Louise Banks and Ian's daughter Hannah is born and where she dies. It was a great find for its curved shape echoing the circle of life. It gave extra strength to the symbolism of the movie.