Over the course of the semester the following 5 movies were analyzed after a close viewing:
The themes of good vs. evil, the other, bullying, and innocence were heavily present in all of these films. This project uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) tecniques to analyze the script of each film and deeper explore these themes. Natural Language Processing is defined by the SAS Institute as "a branch of artificial intelligence that helps computers understand, interpret and manipulate human language." (SAS Inst 2020) I used the science behind NLP to help quantify and visualize the scripts of the above movies.
It should be noted, that while NLP analysis of the scripts can be an interesting and useful method of interacting with these movies a lot of elements from the original film are lost or distilled in this process. The words in the script do not accurately represent the images and sounds heard while watching these films and therefore do not represent the full picture. For example, many of the comedic elements of Life is Beautiful are created through the comedic delivery of actor Roberto Benigni. Benigni's acting performance cannot be captured or interpreted through the NLP methods in this project, so those elements of the film are lost.
Despite the shortcomings of the NLP method it can still be very helpful to analyze the screenplays of these movies because it can reveal patterns that may have otherwise gone unoticed. My intention is for people to use my project as a tool for interpreting these movies and not as a literal interpretation or representation of the whole film. My project only represents the analysis of the words in the scripts of these movies which is a smaller part of the many other important elements that go into these films (eg: lighting, cinematography, score, acting etc).