This project is a study of the movie script 'Casablanca' by Howard Koch and the Epstein brothers. Our goal is to disect this script down to every scene to give us a full breakdown of its content. Our findings will give us light into the dynamic relationships between the main cast of characters along with the hidden context given to us in text outside of just the dialogue.
(12-18-2024) Jessica is a junior at Penn State Behrend pursuing a DIGIT major and minors in Game Development and Data Visualization. For the Casablanca Project, she worked largely on the styling and organization of the website, as well as quality control, keeping the code consistent between the team.
(12-18-24) Sean Martin is a junior at Penn State Behrend also pursuing a DIGIT major with minors in Media Production and English. For the Casablanca Project, he helped access the screenplay to use, find the metadata, worked on the different versions of the endings, and helped developed several tables.
Caleb King is a Penn State Senior majoring in (you guessed it!) DIGIT. His main focuses for this project included the finishing implementation of the script, schema and Methods pages. This included imaging and stylized scroll boxes in each page respectively. He also helped with Git branch management and the output/styling for some of the created tables using XSLT.
We learned about the process of coding an entire document such as a screenplay. It involved an effort on the part of each person taking on a different portion of the script while implementing a method of code so that each of the three portions can flow together smoothly when completed. The project also involved studying the screenplay and realizing that there are different versions of the script. Some editions of the screenplay did not have the ending and others had the same scenes but written in different ways. There are no official versions of the screenplay documented from any official academic sources. We tracked down one specific version of the screenplay that featured a total of 77 scenes and seemed accurate to the finished film. By taking only one example of a screenplay found online, part of what made the project fascinating was discovering the other versions of the script that were similar to the film and also entirely different. An interesting discovery from the project was through reading not only the different screenplays for the movie, but also the play it was based on, Everybody Comes To Rick's, that had an entirely different ending than the film did. However, with the script that we chose, we feel confident that it represents the finished film perfectly while our code also is a great method of documenting and curating it.
Casablanca Project by
Jessica Salemme, Sean Martin, Caleb King is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
