Analyzing Film Adaptation through Narrative Alignment
This work addresses the challenge of quantifying and comparing narrative elements in film adaptations for researchers in computational media studies, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new domain.
The study tackled the problem of analyzing film adaptations by constructing narrative alignments using the Smith-Waterman algorithm and SBERT embeddings to quantify text similarity between scenes and book units, revealing insights into faithfulness, dialog importance, narrative order preservation, and gender representation across 40 adaptations.
Novels are often adapted into feature films, but the differences between the two media usually require dropping sections of the source text from the movie script. Here we study this screen adaptation process by constructing narrative alignments using the Smith-Waterman local alignment algorithm coupled with SBERT embedding distance to quantify text similarity between scenes and book units. We use these alignments to perform an automated analysis of 40 adaptations, revealing insights into the screenwriting process concerning (i) faithfulness of adaptation, (ii) importance of dialog, (iii) preservation of narrative order, and (iv) gender representation issues reflective of the Bechdel test.