The Structure of Narrative: the Case of Film Scripts

📝 Abstract

We analyze the style and structure of story narrative using the case of film scripts. The practical importance of this is noted, especially the need to have support tools for television movie writing. We use the Casablanca film script, and scripts from six episodes of CSI (Crime Scene Investigation). For analysis of style and structure, we quantify various central perspectives discussed in McKee’s book, “Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting”. Film scripts offer a useful point of departure for exploration of the analysis of more general narratives. Our methodology, using Correspondence Analysis, and hierarchical clustering, is innovative in a range of areas that we discuss. In particular this work is groundbreaking in taking the qualitative analysis of McKee and grounding this analysis in a quantitative and algorithmic framework.

💡 Analysis

We analyze the style and structure of story narrative using the case of film scripts. The practical importance of this is noted, especially the need to have support tools for television movie writing. We use the Casablanca film script, and scripts from six episodes of CSI (Crime Scene Investigation). For analysis of style and structure, we quantify various central perspectives discussed in McKee’s book, “Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting”. Film scripts offer a useful point of departure for exploration of the analysis of more general narratives. Our methodology, using Correspondence Analysis, and hierarchical clustering, is innovative in a range of areas that we discuss. In particular this work is groundbreaking in taking the qualitative analysis of McKee and grounding this analysis in a quantitative and algorithmic framework.

📄 Content

The Structure of Narrative: the Case of Film Scripts Fionn Murtagh (1), Adam Ganz (2) and Stewart McKie (2) (1) Department of Computer Science (2) Department of Media Arts Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham TW20 0EX, England Contact author: fmurtagh at acm dot org May 28, 2018 Abstract We analyze the style and structure of story narrative using the case of film scripts. The practical importance of this is noted, especially the need to have support tools for television movie writing. We use the Casablanca film script, and scripts from six episodes of CSI (Crime Scene Investiga- tion). For analysis of style and structure, we quantify various central per- spectives discussed in McKee’s book, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. Film scripts offer a useful point of departure for exploration of the analysis of more general narratives. Our methodology, using Correspondence Analysis, and hierarchical clustering, is innovative in a range of areas that we discuss. In particular this work is groundbreaking in taking the qualitative analysis of McKee and grounding this analysis in a quantitative and algorithmic framework. Kewwords: data mining, data analysis, factor analysis, correspondence anal- ysis, semantic space, Euclidean display, hierarchical clustering, narrative, story, film script 1 Introduction As a framework for analysis of narrative in many areas of application, film scripts have a great deal to offer. We present quite a number of innovations in this work: quantifying and automating a range of qualitative ways of addressing pattern recognition in narrative; use of metric embedding using Correspondence Analysis, and ultrametric embedding through hierarchical clustering of a data sequence, in order to capture semantics in the data; and verifying experimentally the well foundedness of much that McKee [15] describes in qualitative terms. Other than the data mining, two distinct levels of user are at issue here. Firstly and foremostly, we have the scriptwriter or screenwriter in mind. See 1 arXiv:0805.3799v1 [cs.AI] 24 May 2008 [15] for a content-based description of the scriptwriting process. Secondly and more indirectly we have the movie viewer in mind. The feasibility of using statistical learning methods in order to map a characterization of film scripts (essentially using 22 characteristics) onto box office profitability was pursued by [7]. The importance of such machine learning of what constitutes a good quality and/or potentially profitable film script has been the basis for (success- ful) commercial initiatives, as described by [8]. The business side of the movie business is elaborated on in some depth in terms of avenues to be explored in the future, in [6]. A film script is semi-structured in that it is subdivided into scenes and some- times other structural units. Furthermore there is metadata provided related to location (internal, external; particular or general location name); characters; day, night. There is also dialog and description of action in free text. There are literally thousands of film scripts, for all genres, available and openly accessible (e.g. IMSDb, The Internet Movie Script Database, www.imsdb.com ). While offering just one data modality, viz. text, there is close linkage to other modalities, visual, speech and often music. An area of application of our work that is of particular importance is to movies for television. In contrast to a cinema movie, in television a serial dramatization is formulaic in its set of characters, their actions, location, and in content generally. In form it is even more formulaic, in length, initial scenes, positioning of advertisement breakpoints, and in other aspects of format. While screenwriting and subsequent aspects of cinema movie creation and develop- ment have been much studied (e.g. [15]), film writing for television has been less so. The latter is often team-based, and much more “managed” on account of its linkages with other dramatizations in the same series, or in closely related series. These properties of television serial dramatization lead, perhaps even more than for cinema movie, to a need for tools to quantitatively support script writing. Film scripts constitute an outstanding template or model for other domains. One longer term goal of our work is for our tools to provide a platform for in- troducing interactivity into a movie. Interactivity with a film or video includes the following possible uses: (i) it provides an approach to developing interac- tive games; (ii) it allows for use in interactive and even immersive training and learning environments; and (iii) support is also feasible for use in the enter- tainment area, e.g. interactive television. Leveraging the existing corpus and “fanbase” of hit scripts to create new interactive versions could create a whole new sector of movie script based interactive games or filmed variant-sequels to famous movies that take the familiar in a different directio

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