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3 Act, 5 Act, 7 Segment, 22 Beat - Structure and Film

We're The Great Old Ones Now

08:25 / 23.05.02

If you write, do you use these structures? McKee is a big proponent of 3 Act. Producers understand it, it supposedly follows mythic structure. 5 Act is Shakespearian, of course, and a little more involved. Then recently, there's been a rash of alternatives; twenty-two beats, for a more complex story and a sense of gathering momentum which won't bore the audience by telegraphing what's about to happen through the structure.

Does it make any difference at all? Or are they all just masks for what you do anyway?

If you're a filmgoer, are youn aware of these things? Do you get a sense that a movie is 'flat'?

And episodics: Smoke, Blue in the Face, and so on. Do they work? Fargo is part episodic, at least, yet it manages to maintain tension and generate a drive through the story. Smoke was gripping (at least, I thought so.)

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

11:11 / 23.05.02

smoke was far superior to blue in the face, but thats not the point here

episodics can work, but not in the star wars prequal way

as far as acts most films i have seen seem to be the 3 act type, which makes sense cause lately i have been watching a bunch of fanboy wank

When i write though, i think i use more of a five act if its a long piece, be it play or film, because not only is the 5 act willies thing, but also fits fairly well into a watered down joseph campbell vibe, in my mind at least

We're The Great Old Ones Now

11:42 / 23.05.02

Hm. Mr. C was rather keen on the three acts, though. Film schools tend to use him as a tool to analyse the original Star Wars movies to demonstrate 'classic myth structure'.

12:19 / 23.05.02

As a tyro screenwriter, I do find it useful to be aware of the 3 act structure when putting together a script. I generally write a two-page treatment (which unfortunately tends to get a little sketchy towards the ending; is this normal?), then blow that out into a step-outline of 35-45 "scenes." When writing, though, in my limited experience, this outline tends to go out the window a little bit, as I tend to front-load possibly unnessary elements at the expense of story. That was my main problem of my last project, wherein the first draft I put in so many "character building" scenes at the beginning of the script that I felt that the pivotal moment of the story (where the audience/reader has an idea of where the story is going) didn't come until about page 35. (the first draft also ended up bloated at about 160 pages). One of the screenwriting references I was using suggested a "Page 17" rule, where the turning point of the story (the culmination of act 1) occured on or around page 17. It seems like a good enough rule of thumb to follow, less arbitrary than most, so I went back and snip, snip, snipped until my story kicked in early enough.

W/R/T to Joseph Campbell, I think the industry that has been built up around dumbing down "Hero" for Hollywood (as if it needed dumbing down) is responsible for a lot of the annoying cliches one sees in action movies. It might even be responsible for the "magic darkie," but let's not get into that argument here.

As far as episodic structure - the problem with using it in writing a spec script is that while it might make a great movie, it doesn't necessarily "read" as a good movie. Feel free to correct me here. In fact, it seems like the scripts I enjoy the most routinely make "mistakes" that screenwriting books would tell you were death; I'm thinking of the films of Wes Anderson in particular here. I just love "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tennenbaums" but as I watched them I couldn't help but think that there was no way he could sell them if he weren't also directing them. "The Royal Tennenaums" is episodic in structure (though I suppose you can stretch the definition of 3 acts to fit anything) uses VO narration, has little in the way of character development, yet still manages to be a charming picture.

Nick, what's "22 Beats"?

12:20 / 23.05.02

Structure is a good servant, but a poor master.

Fuck McKee. With sharp sticks.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

12:38 / 23.05.02

Jack, I'm not sure structure is either servant or master. I think it's more like landscape gardening...

Dilettantism:

Interesting that your treatments get iffy at the end - mine tend to be vague in the middle.

Bolting your turning points to page 17 is probably a bit eccentric...and I generally find they come thicker and faster than this, anyway, but I look to have one around twenty five to thirty minutes in, to kick us from setup and exploration into crisis and drama. Crudely.

22 Beat, if I remember, is a structure proposed by yet another guru. I never took the course, because I think too much weight is put on structure as something we control rather than something which evolves and which we work with as it happens. Basically, I imagine it breaks down the three act structure into smaller fragments, as a way of accounting for the smaller climaxes within films. Or maybe it's a five act structure with four chunks in each act and two bookends. Or...

You can analyse structures so many different ways...

12:59 / 23.05.02

RE - the ending thing, I usually have an ending point in mind, ie, where the characters are (physically and developmentally) but I get stuck on the climax. For my last two projects, I've ended up taking one of my middle-act "conflict scenes" and artifically ballooned it out to "climax" proportions as a solution, with predictably unsatisfying results.

No star here laces

13:14 / 23.05.02

Nick, were you at the McKee course at the weekend? I got my work to send me on it...

13:23 / 23.05.02

Personally I think structure should only come in at the first revision.

I've co-written a couple feature-lengths, and we never paid too much attention. We were all aware that there should be a turn 20 minutes from the start and another kind of near the end, with a climax in between, but we sort of decided which event was which after the fact - which sort of altered the way we directed the piece, or the way we thought of who the "real" main character was.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

13:59 / 23.05.02

Dilettantism - no, that doesn't sound as if it would work...

Lyra - I didn't go. Thought about it, heard about it on Wednesday night from a bunch of people who did, but basically, I've got what I wanted from him already. Not that I wouldn't be interested to get him to answer some questions, but listening to him lecture (and I gather he's pretty confrontational, not to say rude) is not my bag. What did you make of the course?

grant - I can't help but feel that if there isn't at least the hint of a sound structure by the time the first draft is written, something's gone badly wrong. Not because you should 'put one in' at the beginning, but because good stories have a logic of their own, and to write something which has none would require a really ghastly piece of storytelling, surely?

14:36 / 23.05.02

structure is a delightful thing. you can see it at work in some of the most arbitrary or episodic of films, if they grip you. hanif kureishi (sp?) for example writes very novelistic episodic movies like My Beautiful Laundrette or Sammie and Rosie Get Laid; these films feel meandering, yet strangely entertaining, and when you get to the end you realize you were being carefully moved to a certain spot all along. Great structure, when combined with great words and characters, will always give you something you want to watch.

i love how you can just feel act structure when you watch movies, especially in less "hollywood" movies. it's always amazing to me to see the endless, infinite variety of ways good writers produce unique material out of basic rules.

i think mckee is very helpful, especially for new writers. people make incredible progress once they stop farting around trying to make their own rules and start thinking about how great work has been made in the past. sure, his deal won't help you to create Holy Mountain or The Begotten, but it will help you do anything else.

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

17:04 / 23.05.02

oh, yeah, my bad nick, got my typing mixed up,

We're The Great Old Ones Now

08:46 / 24.05.02

Gypt - can you really 'see structure at work'? And doesn't that mean something's wrong, rather than something's right?

Anyone else conscious of structure and feel annoyed by it, or delighted?

18:29 / 24.05.02

no, i see it cuz i'm looking for it; my friends who are painters can see very clearly the interplay of colors in van gogh paintings, i just see blurry flowers. when i studied a bit of classical music, symphonies became much more enjoyable to me because i could tell what the fuck was going on. it's the same with film stucture... great writers have become much more brilliant to me now that i closely watch what they do in the film.

of course, i am the freak who takes very careful notes on every single movie i watch, but hey i'm trying to hone a craft over here.

18:06 / 27.05.02

I really new to writing film scripts, coming from an conceptual and illustration background in underground comics and a fair share of Games Mastering.
As with all my artist work my main inspiration for narrative is spiritual, by which I mean from visions and from moments of illumination. Sounds a little wanky, but I assure you it isn't.
My first short film script, which Nick has read incedently, is rather challenging with regards the narrative. It started out as a hypothetical approach to the zombie genre with a modern psychological styling. I was caught up fusing two story ideas running in parallel, 'Is there a zombie apocalypse or is this the projection of a nervous breakdown?
I had a strong idea of the opening and the closure, with no real angle or drive to the middle. The solution came in teh form of some psychology books I borrowed off of a friend, who, suprising, teaches psychology. I looked into the state of mind of the terminally ill and discovered the Kubler/Ross model of psychology of said condition.
It breaks down the coming to terms with ones situation into 5 distinct phases. 1.Denial, 2.Anger, 3.Bargaining with a Higher Order, 4.Depression (2 forms of) and 5.realisation.
This became my structure, and I applied it in a very avant garde/direct fashion, twisting the exposition of the sole character on the voices of the undead outside, a statue of Buddha, the missing girlfriend and memories of his mother.

I felt it worked and would be challenging to the audience initially, due to their consumption of mainstrean narrative, but also subconsciously reminiscent of human processes.