Progress report Outcome - ShelinaGobardhan/FOTD-Portfolio- GitHub Wiki

Preliminary conclusion

After the described steps, progress reports, running scripts and interpretations, a temporary conclusion can be given. We chose three themes related to the story of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: characters, locations and gender issues. A beginning of a comparison of the script and the book were made on the basis of these themes.

To summarize our findings up until now: It has shown that not all the characters that appear in the book are also mentioned or given screen time in the movie. For characters that are mentioned and given screen time there is a shift that occurs in the importance of the part of certain characters in the movie adaptation of the book.

Both the book and movie show a striking difference (see step 6 where the numbers of how many times the gender words occur) in the use of gender. The only words that showed gender equality are 'wizard' and 'witch'. When we look at the interpretations of the Location report and refer back to the research question then the answer is that for the locations, don’t differ a lot from the book.

So, 'how do movies adapted from books differ from the book itself?' Conclusively, we can say that the movie is significantly different from the book when it comes to character appearance. When it comes to gender issues there is hardly any difference between the book and the script. And finally when it comes to locations the movie doesn’t differ a lot from the book.

But ultimately this outcome is only relative, because only three themes were researched out of the infinitive possibilities we could choose.

Final conclusion

For the second portfolio we added the subject of dialects. Some characters talk in a certain dialect, like Hagrid and Stan Shunpike (the conductor of the Knight bus), but how is this portrayed in the book and the movie (script)? Furthermore we took a closer look at the subjects that were already touched upon in the first portfolio.

When taking a closer look at the comparison between the book and the scripts from its movie adaptation one has to keep the different natures of books and films in mind: In books everything that happens, has to be made explicit in the writing of the author so that the reader will be able to create the image of the events in his mind. This is not necessary for a person who is watching a movie, where all the events that take place in the book are depicted by the presence and appearance of actors and props. This lowers the need to make certain things explicit in the film script as they can be seen on screen by the audience.

When looking deeper into gender issues and involving the non-main characters that both occur in the book and the script we can see that male words occur strikingly more because of the fact that there are more male characters. This explains the huge difference in gender words. This can be further interpreted that Harry Potter as a whole is facing gender issues, both the script as the book. Women are clearly under-represented.

The second Location analysis focused on finding lines where ‘Harry’ and one of the three locations are both mentioned. This led to the finding that one can see that the important locations are not only mentioned by Harry, but also by a lot of other characters, so there is a lot of interaction with the important elements of the story. For the comparison of the book with script it doesn’t give any more information, because the codes didn’t give any results for the movie script, probably because the script doesn’t have quotes. So we conclude that there is still no big difference between the locations in the book and in the movie.

When we look at the use of dialect utterances, we find almost no differences between the book and the movie.
All percentages in the table with results of the chosen utterances of dialect are within the range of 'decreasing-percentages' from book to script, except the percentages of "yeh" vs. "you": the utterance "yeh" is far more used in the script than one would expect. An explanation of this result could be, that it is a simple word to use by an actor to give an idea of speaking dialect.

To come back to our research question : “How do movies adapted from books differ from the book itself?”, we can conclude that, in the case of our data sets, a movie adaptation significantly differs from its original work when it comes to character appearance. Shifts occurs in the importance of the part of certain characters in the movie adaptation as opposed to the book.

When it comes to locations in the movie there does not seem to be a large difference between the locations in the book and in the movie. Furthermore, our research has brought to light striking differences in the use of gender in both the film as the book. The only words that showed gender equality are 'wizard' and 'witch'. We can also see that male words occur strikingly more because of the fact that there are more male characters and women are clearly under-represented.

In conclusion we can say that the most significant changes are made in the distribution of screen time for the characters. This leads to shifts in importance of characters and gender issues that are plainly visible on and off the big screen.