Plan For The Film Of An Alien Siege

Part 1 - Sieges

A siege is pretty much the most boring thing that can happen in war ever. Its organised waiting. There are loads of films about sieges. Even films that aren’t set in wars are about sieges (Night of the Living Dead, Assault on Precinct 13). Of all these films, I can’t remember one where the point of view of the viewer was with the attacking forces. We are always inside. The good guys always defend.

Because they have better camera angles. The view from an arrow slit is also pretty good for a camera.

Bullshit, except not really. Of all the places I can imagine, the besieged fortification has the most perfect unity between its geography, (the physical positioning of people within and around it,) and its narrative.

Imagine a film about a siege and start thinking about the kinds of information you could remove and still have the film make some kind of sense as a comprehensible story.

Music, easy. Sound? Ok, no more voices, and no subtitles either. Those are the easy ones.

Colour? Gone. Black and white only.

Faces? Gone. Pixelate them.

Identifying marks. Body shapes. Gender. Clothes. Uniforms. Gone. Only grey shapes remain.

Era? Ok, take away the background of any distance shots, grey that out. Black out anything non-human that isn’t also built environment. No more nature. Now take away the detail of the environment. No more stone, no more sandbags. Only mass. Mass and grey moving shapes.

But some grey shapes are still outside and some are still inside. And the ones out are trying to get in.

Movement. Cut to one frame per second instead of 24.

Time? Ok, this one probably wouldn’t work.  You do need time to tell a story.

You couldn’t tell shit about this story, but if someone asks you what’s going on, but you could probably say “It’s about one group of people-things trying to get into a thing and another group of people –things want to keep them out.”

Everything flows out from peoples relations in space.

Part 2 – Inside and Outside

So I started trying to count the ways the space shapes the story. This is what I came up with.

	Defenders	Attackers
1	Look out. They see a Landscape, their opponent is a shifting mass on a single plain.	Look in. They focus on a single object (the fort) which is vertically orientated.
2	As the narrative goes on they lose this landscape view. They focus on the inside of a familiar structure which becomes alien and threatening. They focus on a concentrated projected stream of force.	As the narrative goes on, they focus not just upon the central mass, but upon one point of that mass. (The gate, the breach)
3	They try to retain and increase physical mass in the most literal sense. Building, piling, arranging, amassing.	They try to destroy mass, to abrade it to nothingness, to create pure space.
4	They seek stasis.	They seek movement and change.
5	Are unobserved, socially opaque (attackers cannot see who they talk to, when or why), but are in physical danger. (Rocks, arrows, bombs.)	Are observed, (can be seen walking around)  socially exposed but more likely to be physically safe.
6	Are in close physical communication with each other. (Can see, touch, grab and shout at each other.)	Must move to reach, touch, grab or shout to each other. More physically separate.
7	Are likely to act across class, race and gender lines. More and more likely as the story goes on. (“Not bad … for an elf”)	Likely to reflect social hierarchy. Act as miniature of origin society with power relationships intact.
8	Likely to expose positive personal characteristics hidden by social characteristics.	Personal power directly represented and usually accurate. Exactly as dangerous as they look.
9	A group of individuals with names.	A mass. “You there!”
10	If they change morally, tend to become morally stronger (UNLESS IT’S A HORROR FILM)	If they change morally, tend to become weaker.

So this is quite nice. It turns out all those siege films are really about a group of disparate people forced into circumstances where hierarchy, class, race and gender lines will fall away and they can act together as one, (without losing their individuality) in an overriding moral cause.

This is basically the tribal story of the West. It is our Ur-tale, or one of them. (Along with the love story and the story of the guy that kills a lot of guys.) A group of very different people have to face a challenge, doing so they learn to understand and value each other and work together as a team, but without being subsumed as people. If we had shaman, this is the story they would tell.

This might be the story of a bunch of cultures, I don’t really know. To me it feel arch-western and specifically post WWII.

If this was a culture-studies class then we could stop there and consider ourselves very clever. Of course we have something much more important to do. We must plan a model fort for an alien siege.

Part Three – Aliens

Let’s scramble the info we have so far and re-arrange it to create the sides in an alien siege.

Attackers

Look out. They see a Landscape, their opponent is a shifting mass on a single plain.

As the narrative goes on, they focus not just upon the central mass, but upon one point of that mass. (The gate, the breach)

They try to retain and increase physical mass in the most literal sense. Building, piling, arranging, amassing.

They seek movement and change.

Are unobserved, socially opaque (attackers cannot see who they talk to, when or why), but are in physical danger. (Rocks, arrows, bombs.)

Must move to reach, touch, grab or shout to each other. More physically separate.

Personal power directly represented and usually accurate. Exactly as dangerous as they look.

A group of individuals with names.

Are likely to act across class, race and gender lines. More and more likely as the story goes on.

(“Not bad … for an elf”)

If they change morally, tend to become weaker.

Is there any shape that can make sense of this?

Aliens attacking outwards, into a shifting mass, building and arranging, trying to change things.

Doing this while in danger. Unseen, distant from each other. Look dangerous and are dangerous. Named individuals.

They work across class lines but may become weaker.

Philosopher-Wasps? Breaking into.. something? Powerful, dangerous, intelligent builders. Maybe they build with the bodies of their enemies? Maybe they build very quickly and well on their own according to their own plans, each different, hyper-adaptive artist-wasps? As time goes on their invasion slackens, becomes more difficult, they speak across art-clade boundaries, but this makes them too similar, easy to kill. Art-wasps building hyper-individual puzzle-box invasion saps, invading.. who?

Defenders

Look in. They focus on a single object (the fort) which is vertically orientated.

As the narrative goes on they lose this landscape view. They focus on the inside of a familiar structure which becomes alien and threatening. They focus on a concentrated projected stream of force.

They try to destroy mass, to abrade it to nothingness, to create pure space.

They seek stasis.

Are observed, (can be seen walking around)  socially exposed but more likely to be physically safe.

Are in close physical communication with each other. (Can see, touch, grab and shout at each other.)

Likely to reflect social hierarchy. Act as miniature of origin society with power relationships intact.

Likely to expose positive personal characteristics hidden by social characteristics.

A mass. “You there!”

If they change morally, tend to become morally stronger (UNLESS IT’S A HORROR FILM)

So these are some kind of hive-beings. They live in a place, (a plane?) where some new physical thing has arrived. The saps of the art-wasps expand out of it as physical masses, which they must destroy in order to keep things the way they have always been. But they may be losing and their familiar place? has become strange and threatening. They can be seen easily from the saps but are hard to harm. They are packed in closely to each other. They are hierarchal and this won’t change during the film but they will reveal positive personal characteristics during it.

My first thought is that the hive beings represent some kind of living anti-space and the art-wasps are colonising it, reducing it to matter with their novel fractal constructions, killing the hive-beings and using their solidified corpses to build more.

The hive-beings can destroy matter but the more original and unexpected it is the more likely they are to die trying to destroy it and end up being reduced to mere matter themselves. The Art-Wasps are burrowing into them, staring out through portholes in their invasion-structures, looking at the hordes of pale massless things, innovating and dreaming of destruction, but slowly running out of ideas while the peaceful hive-things slowly try to adapt their conservative hierarchal society to prevail. The Hyper-Wasps are close to reaching the core of the ghost-hive.

So if there’s a film it’s about these hive-ghosts fighting to protect, maybe Nirvana? from the hideous hyper-individual invaders. Or maybe it’s a tragedy about a brave group of wild alpha-wasp adventurers who had the nerve to challenge the rulers of the limbo-space and change things for everyone, maybe that’s what wasp parents tell their children before they sleep. Maybe wasps cry when the credits roll.

“That’s why you have to have your own idea’s, dream your own dreams. Never be too much like anyone else.”

Part Four - Toys

How do we represent this as a sculpture in three-dimensional space? How do we turn it into a game?

The wasps are represented by shining metallic 3d puzzle pieces. Each is a different shape. All of the shapes are sharp-angled and violent looking. They can be linked together but only novel connections can be made.

The hive beings are hollow paper constructions, they can block off parts of the board. Like in ‘Go’, except you are playing against the space itself.

Wasp-player can turn Hive-players pieces to more Wasp pieces if they touch. But, if Wasp player repeats any connections without realising it, Hive player can remove Wasp pieces from the board.

Hive player has a core, or maybe just a volume. If Wasp player can encompass (like ‘Go’) or cross it somehow, then they win. If they run out of pieces , or fall into stasis, they lose.

It’s not quite 40k, but you get the idea. The elements have numbers so you can scramble your own. Find out the story-logic of the two sides. Then create alien races that make sense of that logic, direct the film in your head. Then create and sculpture or game-piece based on the logic of the alien siege. Totally different alien forts for each try.

Speak With Air

Air speaks to you of what it contains. The fullness of the message depends on the volume questioned, the more immediate the volume  then the more personal and vivid the reply.

Speak With Air is almost useless in the outer world, the air moves constantly and has no individual consciousness, any attempt to speak with it is like speaking with the whole world.

In a dungeon, the air is stagnant. Still unmoving air is cognitively dead, or, from its perspective, undead. It moans, sighs, notices and reports little.

In the vast interconnected caverns beneath the earth, the air is concentrated, shaped into personality and mindfulness, yet also moves, flows and lives. In these circumstances, or those like them, the air can speak.

Air does not understand mass, weight, colour or light. It senses form, shape, texture and movement. It has a keen sense of its own composition. It knows if it has smoke in it for instance, it knows its own temperature. It senses the respiration of lungs as keen points of annihilation and transformation moving through it. Like fires but lesser, rhythmic and mild.

Air can generally sense those human-shaped things which move and do not breath, which can be useful in hunting undead.

Air thinks and forgets very quickly, so information moving through, for instance, a series of interconnected caves, is very quickly degraded the further it travels from its source. Air cannot be bargained with as it will not recall the deal. Every minded self of air is immediate and transient, regarding itself as eternal, yet lodged firmly in the now.

	The Volume with which you wish to speak.	What is it like speaking to the volume?	What level of information can it communicate?
1	House room	Speaking directly with another person	Everything a person could say or know. Like speaking to a blind and sensuous sculptor who exists only in one place.
2	Every room in a house	A group of people shouting from room to room.	Numbers, movements, accurate descriptively but no penetration onto cause.
3	Every room in an office building	Addressing a crowded room, full of people.	As above but with much more disagreement, vagueness and alternate views.
4	Volume of a stadium	Being before a  gigantic crowd	Only massive events and basic one-word emotions.
5	Volume of a city	Shouting on the street of a city	Possibly a very general mood and very major events, for instance, something like 911 would be reported, or a major riot.

Six Science Fiction Fortifications

Forts in Science Fiction are still just forts.

GW ones are not bad at all, but still essentailly just a fort

So far as I know, fortifications don’t really work very well in modern warfare, not against modern armies anyway. If technology shifts again and the defensive once again out-strips the offensive, could we see a renewal of fortifications? I suppose it depends if the nanotech guys manage to outstrip the fusion guys.

So here are five future forts for alien technologies. You can class these with the Exo-Suits of the Hot Girls, The Masks of the Creatures from Before Time and the Backs of Toy Soldiers. It’s kind of like an alternate 40k universe designed specifically to produce innovative and powerful sculptures.

Kinetic Harpoon Forts

Get a bunch of big iron asteroids, shape and mine them into long spear shapes, about the thickness of an office block and three times as long. Use advanced tech to mine inside the asteroid, creating a series of rooms and passages that interconnect, carved out of the metallic rock.

Then line them up in orbit, select where you want your new fortifications. Drop them.

Firstly the impact destroys any enemy present and embeds the iron spear two-thirds deep into the ground. It creates a crater around it. The part sticking out should remain too hot for any survivors to occupy till your forces turn up.

Then get inside the iron spire through one of the holes you left. Turn it into a fortress of meteoric stone. The crater wall can be fortified to become the curtain wall. The entries now underground can be a starting point to expand the fort beneath the earth. The shocked geology of the impact site can turn soft loos soils into packed earth that will bear a tunnel.

British WWI mining in a nutshell, we blow up Germans, Germans fortify the crater, repeat till dead.

Do a bunch of them. Instant defensive line*.

Force-Bubble Pentagram

Star Wars has taught us all that you do not put a shield generator outside the shield it generates. But if you wanted to you could do it like this;

Have a large central fort and five lesser ones surrounding it. Have the central fort generate the force field for the fort north of it, have that fort generate the field for the one clockwise,and so-on, round in a circle, right back to the central fort.

Switch and randomese which forts are generating the fields for which others semi-randomly so observers never know which ones they need to take out to reach the central fort. 

If an outer fort is taken, its supporting generator can simply drop the shield, exposing it to fire from the forts on each side, and from the centre, then re-take it.

Heat-Sink Fort

Assuming force fields can absorb huge amounts of energy but need to disperse it somehow, or at least heat up doing it, the  ‘walls’ could be a network of sharp red-hot heat-dispersal vanes.

The stuff inside the force-field can be super light or purely anti-infantry as it doesn’t need to absorb any impact itself. No-one has really take much advantage  of how strange forcefield tech could make military installations. Generally they need to tell a story and the familiar mass-based constructions give the right military impression as they match what we expect to see.

Imagine something like a star fort but built from leaves of razor-thin red hot ceramic. Infantry assaulting through the shield has to work their way through the labyrinth while under fire from the centre. Like star forts, it would be quite beautiful.

Did you know lots of these had bre-built tunnels radiating out from the walls?

Cannibal Forts

Sci-Fi forts are always coming under attack from hordes of aliens that assault across open ground. A bunch get shot, then the pile of bodies gets big enough that they can just run up the corpse pile and get into hand-to-hand. Because that’s more dramatic.

What if you too advantage of the biomass and had systems set up to transform the bodies into material to increase the fort. Wire cages filled with compressed corpses. Power lifters and cranes. Corpse-compacters. The Ghorids are rumoured to have built a city with bricks made from the blood of their enemies.

The longer the war goes on, the bigger the fort gets, increasing with each assault.

Titan Forts

A fallen Titan or Mecha on a battlefield is effectively a fortification. It provides high ground and broken terrain. Radiation or emissions can make the surrounding area hazardous. It already has corridors and fire points, you can scavenge and re-purpose weapons.

  

Also you are fighting over a gigantic metal corpse.

Erosion Forts

For a strategy operating in deep-time. Built to channel the natural erosion of a valley or mountain so that the shifting of the land forms natural revetments. The sedemanting at a rivers head could be shaped to create islands in the right places. The erosion of a coastline could be arranged to create defensive emplacements. (There is a slight suggestion the Maia were up to this in the Silmarillion

Planned for a battle that may take place in several thousand years, or to alter the strategic landscape of a developing or implanted culture. Getting the landscape ready, just in case.

*Probably where Ornthanc came from.