The Simpsons
already told it before.
Matt Groening's
series
has become a sort of catalog of predictions to turn to for reference when reality insists on imitating art. It is also the
bible
of many screenwriters and, often, the source from which they are inspired by its ability to summarize all the plots. In reality, everything is in the Simpsons because its creators wanted it that way, introducing winks and profiles that are part of the history of cinema and universal literature in the creative process and in the construction of their characters.
In the creative universe, these narrative
devices
are known as
tropes
.
Identifying them, compiling them, measuring their influence on the success of the series and turning them into a tool in the construction of scripts is one of the current challenges for creators.
But, what if artificial intelligence made it possible to do this work on a large scale, exponentially increasing the database and the ability to analyze all that information?
Four researchers from the
universities of Granada and Cádiz
have set out to do this, and they have designed a computer system that uses a database with more than 25,000 tropes used in
10,766 films.
and it also analyzes the criticisms of the spectators from the information contained in the specialized platforms.
The combination of all this information, processed in the shaker of
artificial intelligence,
could lead to successful formulas made available to the world of cinema and series.
The authors of the research, published in the American scientific journal
PLOS One
, are
Pablo García-Sánchez and Juan Julián Merelo
, from the Department of Computer Architecture and Technology of the UGR, and
Antonio Vélez and Manuel Jesús Cobo
, from the Department of Computer Engineering from the University of Cádiz, signatories of an article entitled:
"The Simpsons did it: exploring the film trope space and its large scale structure". "
.
But if the success of a series ultimately depends on an algorithm, where is creativity left? "Well, in place, because creativity will continue to be the soul of the product. But we offer the possibility of facilitating the more technical part of the process. The narrator will have a digital tool just as the architect has programs that carry out industrial calculations. , so that you can concentrate your efforts on the most creative part. A screenwriter can also use the information provided by this system to
cast
characters or build the foundations of the script from tropes that have been proven effective, which are identifiable for the public to whom it is directed ", points to EL MUNDO
JJ Merelo
.
'Friends', another catalog of stereotypes
There are stereotypes that we find in many television products, adapted to the context, but with repeated features.
Sometimes they are homages to classics of literature or cinema, but most of them are prototypes that have been shown to work in very different contexts.
For the authors of this research, in addition to
The Simpsons
, there is another reference manual that is
Friends
,
the production of
Marta Kauffman and David Crane
, which aired from 1994 to 2004 and continues to triumph on platforms today.
The failed actor who represents the character of Joey is one of those tropes that we can also find in the Penny of
The Big Bang Theory
(TBBT). And the teenage Monica Geller (Friends) somehow represents the ugly duckling, mercilessly revisited in the character of Amy (TBBT), who never transforms into a swan. The macho, unrepentant flirt that Matt Leblanc plays in
Friends
also has his much less lovable version in the Barney Stinson of
How I Met Your Mother
.
The immature parent who receives daily lessons from a more intelligent and sensible child is another commonplace that is easy to identify in such successful creations as
Modern Family
and
Gilmore Girls
. But, if there is a genre where the classics are rebuilt, it is in that of superheroes and science fiction, with continuous identifiable Homeric references in
Star Wars
or the full Marvel catalog.
The creator is the one who decides how to use these resources, if it is to build on them or to deconstruct them, because that is another recurring technique: that of
turning the cliché
and innovating from what was done before.
Pablo García Sánchez, principal investigator of the project.
In the case of
The Simpsons
, the story of the life of an American middle-class family through about 700 animated chapters is built with a huge number of references, some more recognizable than others for the viewer. In fact, there are some that are only identifiable to a very specialized audience, such as its continuous mathematical references, which allows
The Simpsons to
be a product aimed at the general public and, at the same time, a cult series. When Matt Groening made
Donald Trump
president of the United States, what he did was, neither more nor less, put a real
outsider
at the head of the system
, a
whole trope. Like when Juanma Bajo Ulloa chose
a black actor
to act as lehendakari in
Airbag
. In reality they had no intention of predicting anything but quite the opposite: exploiting the absurdity of an unlikely situation. Although in the case of Trump, the reality was shown more crazy than the imagination of the writers of the Simpsons.
Merelo cites another popular comedy classic like
Land as You Can
,
where there is also a very long catalog of references, most of the times revisited with irony and parodies. It also served to exploit new narrative techniques such as the one that consists of superimposing secondary scenes, which run in the background, and which do not affect the story line of the film. As if the narration were
a circus with several tracks
. "That has also become a trope in itself," explains the researcher. As the Vietnam War is also a deconstructed trope in the thug
Tropic Thunder,
by Ben Stiller and Etan Cohen, or the clichés typical of spy movies in the satirical
Zoolander
, also with Stiller leading the cast.
From the video game
The authors of the project, who demonstrate a very deep knowledge of the universe of cinema and series, came to this line of research, however, from the
world of video games,
after verifying to what extent the secondary characters were tremendously simple and were solved without any depth.
"We thought we could enrich those profiles and we began to explore the use of narrative techniques from the world of cinema. From there we arrived at what we have called the troposphere."
The proposal put forward by these Andalusian researchers consists of feeding their
own database
with the identified tropes and combining it with the information available on a platform such as IMDb (Internet Movie Database), which measures the viewers' opinion about the contents through scales of series and movies.
"In reality, our proposal democratizes all the information that the large film and series platforms, such as Netflix, already manage and process based on the data they obtain from their users." It is common for Netflix to analyze your preferences to propose new series or movies. But it has even gone one step further, creating new content based on the
massive preferences of its users
. "This information is substantial for operators and large audiovisual production companies." All this data is today a very valuable commodity that companies jealously guard and that Granada researchers want to make available to the general user but, above all, to professionals who can find here a useful tool in the successful construction of content.
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