Adam Ganz

The structure of narrative: The case of film scripts

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 McKees 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.

New methods of analysis of narrative and semantics in support of interactivity

Abstract Our work has focused on support for film or television scriptwriting. Since this involves potentially varied story-lines, we note the implicit or latent support for interactivity. Furthermore the film, television, games, publishing and other sectors are converging, so that cross-over and re-use of one form of product in another of these sectors is ever more common. Technically our work has been largely based on mathematical algorithms for data clustering and display. Operationally, we also discuss how our algorithms can support collective, distributed problem-solving.

Tag clouds for displaying semantics: the case of filmscripts

We relate tag clouds to other forms of visualization, including planar or reduced dimensionality mapping, and to Kohonen self-organizing maps. Using a modified tag cloud visualization, we incorporate other information into it, including text sequence and most pertinent words. Our notion of word pertinence goes beyond just word frequency and instead takes a word in a mathematical sense as located at the average of all of its pairwise relationships. We capture semantics through context, taken as all pairwise relationships. Our domain of application is that of filmscript analysis. The analysis of filmscripts, always important for cinema, is experiencing a major gain in importance in the context of television. Our objective in this paper is to visualize the semantics of filmscript, and beyond filmscript any other partially structured, time-ordered sequence of text segments. In particular, we develop an innovative approach to plot characterization.

‘Cause trouble! Inspire change! Do it first’ – writing series drama for Channel 4

Abstract This article looks at Channel 4 series drama and explores why the Channel has not been able to replicate in its domestic drama series the dramatic complexity and sophistication achieved in its American imports with specific reference to the Sopranos. It suggests that the development process tends to favour a closed system in which the drama embodies an already existing worldview and contrasts this with the wider range of characters and dramatic possibilities in the reality show, which draws on a range of avant-garde practices to create drama The article combines research and analysis with the authors own observations from writing a commissioned but unbroadcast drama series for the Channel.