I’ve decided to go with my idea for constructing a dialogue for two people out of language or lines from their favorite “texts”. I’d like to eventually look at all sorts of texts including books, television show scripts, etc. But for the sake of ease and clarity, I’ll be starting with movie scripts. This is inspired by the way people repeat lines back to each other from things they have read or seen. I often wonder – what if these were the only words we could use to communicate? What if our vocabulary was populated only by what we consumed? I guess, in a sense, it is, but it would be interesting to look at it through the lens of popular culture.
Here’s how I see it working:
-Get access to my myspace & Friendster accounts
I’m not sure how to do crawling with anything that’s password-protected. In the end, these don’t necessarily have to be my friends, but since I want to get these people to “perform” the scripts after they are created, I’ll stick with who I know for now.
-Scrape profiles for favorite movies and make list for each friend
-Search for movie scripts
-Accumulate source files
-Analyze each script
It seems as though I should be looking for what sort of language is significant or prominent. I need to figure out how to discern what lines are sort of iconic, representative, or memorable from the movie as a whole.
-Select “pairings”
In other words, decide who will be talking to who. I will probably do this manually, but it would be interesting to think of how to automate this. Should it be random? Should there be some sort of logic to why these two people should be talking to each other?
-Pull out a set number of lines for each person
-Arrange lines in dialogue form to form a new script
I need to figure out some sort of algorithm for this – questions followed by answers, etc.
-Send script to actors with request to generate a “performance”
This could be done via email OR using whatever service I scraped for the information. More likely than not, I’ll have to actually arrange for these people to get together and “perform” the script. The result could be a video created in-person or an audio recording made via telephone.
The way I’m looking at it now, each person will be the embodiment of many characters, or channeling the language of many characters from many movies. The thing I wonder is if I should just focus on the language of one character per movie, or whether it should just be a free-for-all. Also, I wonder if I should just start out simple and do one movie per person. I guess I’ll just experiment and see what’s interesting & engaging and also what I can accomplish in a short amount of time.
I imagine that I will only be able to accomplish chunks of this separately and paste it together myself. It won’t be the most elegant thing, but it’s a good way to get results quickly and see if this would be interesting enough to pursue & polish for the future.
Obviously not for the midterm, but if I could get the full system running, I’d love to create an installation-based scenario where this could be used. There would be two stations next to each other in front of a camera. People enter their favorite movies and then hit “analyze”. While the camera was running, they would then be prompted, line-by-line on their individual screens, with their lines that they would say aloud to each other. The fun part would be that the script would unfold as they were “performing” it – they would never know what the next line was or where the conversation was leading. The video would then be automatically uploaded to a website along with the text of the script. I like the idea because it is seemingly innocuous – listing your favorite movies does not seem particularly personal. But the dialogues might lead to some pretty bizarre places and either way, it causes you to have a full conversation out loud that you might not have had otherwise.
