Scriptionary - Print Topic

- Geek alert -

After a few days of mainstream cable news, well… a few days on a Youtube ABC broadcast cause I got rid of cable years ago, I fried quite a few brain cells and felt compelled to do something constructive. The end result is something I like to call ‘Scriptionary’.

After a few days of searching the net for source code I required, a few days of rewriting and debugging that code to do what I actually wanted to do, I’ve come up with something absolutely useless… but fun.

These are like a mini Thesaurus for each script itself and each document is about 300 to 350 pages long, but they’re PDF format and are only a megabyte or so sitting in a Drobox folder here if you want to download a mini thesaurus/dictionary based on the screenplays Pulp Fiction, Neuromancer, and Nightmare on Elm Street:

Pulp Fiction Scriptionary: https://www.dropbox.com/s/d5w9xwn6un7m4k2/Pulp%20Fiction%20Scriptionary.pdf?dl=0

Neuromancer Scriptionary: https://www.dropbox.com/s/voq1n4g9kxrwcr4/Neuromancer%20Scriptionary.pdf?dl=0

Nightmare on Elm Street Scriptionary: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cwgnxd192kwxw6v/Nightmare%20on%20Elm%20Street%20Scriptionary.pdf?dl=0

These three scripts I’ve dissected into word occurrences (that being, how many times a word appeared in a script), then got rid of the redundant (1 to 3 letter words such as ‘the’, ‘I’, ‘a’, ‘an’, etc…)

- these small but necessary words coincidentally comprise only about 20% of all document foundation, but will account for 80% of the basic language necessary to construct a story. The final 80% (words seldom written) will construct the ideology, concept, and genre of the script. It’s called ‘Zipf's law’ if you wanna do a search and geek out on that.

That said, I took the words that appeared only 1 to 4 times in the document (the other 80%), and had at least 4 letters or more (this comprised the meat of the script outside of basic language words), I was able to compile a unique Thesaurus; building a synonym list for each unique word for each script. Using 3 different genres written by 3 separate authors. Via the thesaurus I was able to get a clear idea of what makes their scripts tick, so to speak. That being, the words they chose to use sparingly, at times only once, and the juxtaposition of those words is what I believe gives each script it’s atmosphere.

If you want a full Thesaurus for a certain script let me know, cause why wouldn’t you want a Thesaurus/dictionary for every fun word in your favorite script!? Time permitting of course.