Analysis of Adapted Films and Stories Based on Social Network

Abstract

Adaptation of a film is the transfer of a novel to its visual medium. The characters of a story or its adapted film are connected and form two different social networks. The underlying theme of the story may remain unaltered but the relationship among the characters generally deviates in the adapted movie. The difference in the alliance of the characters in a story and its corresponding film is reflected in the extracted networks. The study of these character networks exhibits the deviation as per the demands of the visual medium. We propose an efficient method using different weighted graph centrality metrics such as degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and edge contribution factor to explore the dissimilarity in the character categorization within a story and its adapted film. We also examine the deviation of the association among the characters according to the time frames using the Mantel test. We analyze two distinguished novels, Nastanirh and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone , and their celebrated film versions as the case study to indicate how the successful filmmakers interpret the characters in their visual version. The difference in the distribution of the characters in each chapter and the corresponding scene is also analyzed to manifest the convergences and divergences between the two art of expressions. Our approach is distinctive and the analytical results are satisfactory and unbiased than the human perspective.