/ Initiative

The Godfather Movie is one of the greatest movie of all time. I was especially inspired by the stories behind the film of how these talented people(the relatively young inexperienced director and the actors of the film) had achieved in all the critical filming processes. I wanted to create a reading system for people to revisit the history of the movie Godfather. The reading system provides an additional layer of story telling on top of the final movie script in order to reconstruct the history and examine how decisions were made.

The interface lays out the entire script in geometric shapes by using the traditional type writer layout for movie script to visually differentiate the lines of an actor(longer indent) and the description of the scene(shorter indent). I classified the stories into 2 categories, one is the Director Francis Coppola's personal moment(in red), the other is the actors' improvisation(in blue). The final script is categorized into action/sequence/scene, by selecting each scene, the reader could dive into the script to read the stories in the marginalia that had influenced the filming production or the modification of the earlier script. 

An interactive script for film-study could be a direction to push this project further. I am also interested in design research on how people approach movie script for learning film, and what kind of incident or improvisation could be documented in different media forms during the dynamic filming process in order to further study the process of film-making.

Tracing the creative moments of Godfather I through the movie script. Project ongoing.

Prior Research Study: Comparing the 3rd draft with the final script

Coppola’s Moment

The director had dominated the entire movie through the movie by adopting his childhood memory, obstacles during the movie production. His vision of the film was outstandingly achieved by his creative mind and perseverance.