11 Ways To Structure A Screenplay

Michael Hauge: This is sort of the foundation of how you create that emotional experience for the audience or for the readers. Alan Watt: your protagonist goes through a series of experiences that lead to a transformation. CSUN Professor Eric Edson: Everything in the story must keep changing. Jill Chamberlain: The point-of no-return is the one moment and it's external to the character. Adam Skelter: Which is a very specific thing that happens once in the screenplay. Daniel Stamm: The clock isn't ticking quite as fast yet. Chapman University Dodge College Professor Paul Joseph Gulino: Think of it as four 15-minute scripts that each one builds on the last. Gary Goldstein: You're writing 120 page script or you know it's ten page as a sequence if you write more like 100 page script it's eight or nine pages of sequence. Daniel Calvisi: It's not deciding what you will write it's providing a form and a template with which the writer pours their story into. Erik Bork: There's not enough scenes here there's not enough that it's happening for this to fill two hours. Barbara Seymour Giordano: I feel like I've heard about that before what is this crazy thing called the hero's journey? Dr. Ken Atchity: And that's what a carpenter would do if he wanted to make a table he would take a table apart and see how it was put together that's what a mechanic would do if he wanted to build an engine. 11 Ways To Structure A Screenplay - let me preface it by saying this is what its sort of built on I mean my underlying philosophy of all storytelling whether you're a novelist or screenwriter movie maker TV writer whatever it might be is that your primary goal as a storyteller must be to elicit emotion you must create an emotional experience for the audience if it's a movie or a play or for the reader if you're a screenwriter and you have to get get it read so you can get the movie made or if you're a novelist or whatever so your primary goal has to be to create emotion and this is a way to accomplish that goal these are the this is sort of the foundation of how you create that emotional experience for the audience or for the reader and so these six stages are the six stages you're going to take your hero through and also the audience through as we go from the beginning of the story to the end so the first of the six stages what constitutes the first 10% of the story is what I call the set up that's simply where we introduced the hero you create an emotional connection of that character you show her living or everyday life then there's a turning point the opportunity something new happens that takes us into the second stage that's the next 15 percent of the movie or the script by the way the percentages if novelists are watching this are a little more fluid you don't have to stick quite as closely but in scripts there are one or two pages on either side of these percentages pretty pretty consistently so the second stage the second 15 percent of the movie is what I call a new situation your hero has now been presented with some event that takes them somewhere new it might be geographically new or just some new circumstance where they have to figure out what's going on then something happens at the one-quarter mark at the end of Act one that is going to move the character towards a specific visible goal they are going to then declare and begin pursuing a specific finish line that they want to reach by the end of the story my term for that the outer motivation for the character because it's outwardly visible and it's their desire so it might be to stop a serial killer it might be to win the love of the love interest in the movie whatever now they begin pursuing that so they go into Act two and the first half of Act two is stage three that's progress they formulate a plan and the plan seems to work and the obstacles start getting bigger and bigger until finally at the midpoint of that story they're going to make a bigger commitment to the goal up to that point they sort of have one foot in one foot out now they're going to reach what I call the point of no return something's going to happen that demands of them that they sort of put both feet in so they're going to devote everything they can now to achieving the goal they can't back up they burn their bridges behind them so to speak so that moves them into stage 4 which is complications in higher stakes because the further end of the story the character goes the more is at stake because it the goal becomes more and more important to them but also the harder it is to achieve the goal the outside world is going to start closing and the bad guys going to discover that the hero is after him or whatever it might be so it gets tougher and tougher and tougher until at the 3/4 mark right at the end of act 2 the hero is going to suffer or encounter a major setback something's going to happen that destroys seemingly any hope of achieving the goal the plan is out the window the worst possible thing that could happen happens and so in response to that the hero will do two things first the hero's going to retreat and try and go back to the life they were living at the beginning and give up on the goal but that doesn't work they're not satisfied they're not fulfilled or they just can't give up because somebody's life is at stake or whatever so then they make one last all-or-nothing do-or-die final push and that's the stage 5 which is the final push it's putting everything on the line giving every ounce of courage and energy they have until they reach the final turning point the fifth turning point and that's the climax that's where everything gets resolved that's where the hero faces the villain for the last time or the heroines the love of the love interest and they decide they're going to live happily ever after or whatever that climax might be and then the sixth stage is what I call the aftermath because we need to see the new life that this hero that this character is going to live having completed this journey and that's pretty much it it's it's like a before and after picture starting out in an everyday life going through this journey to accomplish this goal and then in the end seeing how their life has been transformed because they took this journey one of my favorite instructors that I worked with his name is Ron Mita he taught a class over in Valencia and he wrote SWAT and then I think he sold some stuff he developed robots for blue sky or something really good guy very practical great writer very cool guys amazing for pitching as well and he had this he was the one that introduced me to this idea of just twenty four plot points and and he said just you know literally just write down 24 just 24 numbers and just put PP plot point plot by plot point and then break it down into you know the first acts and then you know most people say first second and third but everybody divides it at the midpoint now it really comes down to how do you define an act and in researching when I was working on the videos I was trying to come up with a good definition for act and you know I looked at Robert McKee Truby Trottier a lot of the greats and I couldn't find a very clear specific definition of an act so I you know I'm ridiculously pedantic so I really tried to come down to this boil it down to its essence I try to be as precise as I can with the terms and definitions like for example inciting incident that words always that terms always bothered me just because technically every single sequence has an inciting incident has an incident that's inciting the next behavior a Snyder will refer to as the catalyst a catalyst is where you take two elements and a chemical reaction that's already going to happen and a catalyst speeds it up so what you're saying is that the catalyst is going to take something that's inevitable and enhances it that's why I call it the impetus and impetus is a force that moves that motivates movement and that's which is a very specific thing that happens once in the screenplay so that and that's you know that's my terminology that I use I think whatever metaphor helps people make sense of this story and Taker these essential elements that's fine so Ron Mitas approach was basically put the 24 plot points plot point six is end of Act one plot point 12 is a midpoint plot point 18 is your low point and then plot point I think it was twenty one is your climax and then after that's falling action very simple and it's like we would we would literally just sit there and plot out a story in an hour and it's it's super pragmatic so from there it really came down to trying to understand all right if we keep dividing everything in the midpoint like Pilar for example should you use act a 2a and 2b and it kept on begging this question what is an act and that's the big question and when everybody said you know there's people like like Dave and friends Oney he came to CalArts gave one of my favorite lectures on story ever and he was like fuck three act structure there's no such things ax you just understand story you get into character and you throw conflict at them and they pursue their objectives and don't worry about ax and that's fine now if that works for you that's awesome I don't like to me all of its modular all of it is use it as assets that help you write and anything that's holding you back from writing let it go you know has this kind of to me I like to understand his things as thoroughly as I can I learned very slowly and thoroughly and then let go whenever the story needs to take its own direction so the way I look at an act is essentially defined by strategies so a character the the first act as a character has a specific strategy which is their normal daily life this is the value systems that they that have gotten them to this point in life so when the impetus comes in and throws their life out of balance they find suddenly that they have to they start to negotiate it and try and be like well I don't want to change my life I don't want to do anything but the second they cross that threshold and begin to shift into a new strategy then they've crossed into a new act so what I've found every single time is that act to for example you usually have a character that's you know trying something new like Tootsie you know I watched that as a kid it's so great public is brilliant so you have was Michael Dorsey who's dressed as Dorothy Michaels and he's having success and everything he's doing is bringing him more and more success and it looks like hey this new strategy is working before that a strategy was I'm gonna be a difficult actor until no one will work with him so he hits his breaking point all right I'm gonna dressed as a woman and commit completely to the role and and he sees nothing but success until he hit the midpoint when everything that he's doing feels like it's paying off but ultimately betrays his authenticity so it's at the midpoint where basically you feel like you're getting everything you want and this can come is completely subjective to the needs of the story this is just generally how the how the structure tends to go but when you hit the midpoint often you're you learn that you are as far away from your original objective as you could be thinking that you're just about to achieve it generally speaking and that realization whatever that is the introduction of a new conflict or something like that creates a kind of shift in strategy and usually that strategy is very like frantic and coping and so all the value systems that had informed that earlier strategy of hey everything's gonna work you hit the midpoint and it's failing and you just come tumbling down the mountain till you get down to the low point because all that the first two acts are all about setup and then the second two are all about payoff so that's second that third what I define is an act well what is to be but I just go back three it's easier that way is really just a strategy of collapsing down the hill until you get to the low point so all of those choices are paying off but for the bad the most important thing is if you've invested in a character and you care about what the character wants you understand what the character wants and you understand what's at stake if they don't get it you're free to do anything you want you can play with start to throw away structure altogether as long as you have that like Sorkin says worshipping at the altar of intent conflict is evident yeah she get my quotes down a little better but it's it really comes down to understanding the nature of character every scene has to have a kind of emotional motivation and if it's not emotional then we're not we're going to disengage it's not just it's not just conflict it should be conflict that's increasing as we're going along so I mean you know I see a I see a lot of television a movie I mean right now is a great time for writers there's so much good writing there's so much really strong writing a lot of it comes down to pacing a lot of it comes down to really making sure that the audience is with the main character and that their choices are making sense and that that you care about how this is going to affect the way they're moving forward but I think if you're tracking that and most you know most writers we're all you know we're delving into ourselves to try and pull out this meaning a lot of it like for example working with with producers most of the notes that I'll get tend to be kind of you know just tracking like does it make sense that this character would do this at this time you know and it's about trying to project and project yourself into the character and understand the intentions and if that's consistent with your overall character profile one of the single most important aspects of screenwriting any long form narrative II novel writing to just screenwriting in particular is change things thus everything in the story must keep changing as it flows it got it has to be different 5-10 minutes from now than then it what the circumstances were previously ten minutes ago it has to keep changing and I I had came to believe there had to be a pattern of change and what I discovered was this this gets a little numeric you know there but stick with me for this because it's it's important and I think enormous ly useful three acts okay and in a screenplay you've got three acts first act in Act one I noticed there are six sequences following one another that I called I came to call hero gold sequences here's the definition for a hero gold sequence a hero gold sequence is any two to seven page section of your screenplay in which and through which your hero or heroine pursues one short-term goal physical short-term goal only one as one step toward achieving the overall story goal right just just that little piece of it and at the end of that seven or so you nothing is exact you know but seven or so pages something happened or some discovery is made by this hero that I call fresh news in other words they turn up something that was unknown by them and by us by the audience about what they are doing that puts an end to that current single goal and offers up a new short term physical single goal to be pursued in the next step and that there are six of these hero goal sequences six little individual pursuits of individual specific goals in the entirety of act one and what we call this many names for this plot point one there's the the first major turning point that kind of thing I call it stunning surprise one when stunning surprise one happens which ends Act one officially and dramatically ends Act one and kicks the hero forward tumbling head-over-heels into Act two I call it stunning surprise one because that it should be I believe the emotional impact on both the hero and the audience it needs to be emotional and it needs to be impactful not abstract that always happens in here a goal sequence six always and it continues in the first half of the second act there are six more hero goal sequences and hero goal sequence number twelve always contains the midpoint sequence that's a separate discussion the midpoint is a fascinating part of movies that work and it's it's it's rich and layered with things that go on relative to character growth and relative to the plot being you know bumped up to the next level and all but it always happens in number 12 in the second half of Act two there are six more wonder of wonders there are six more hero goal sequences and hero goal sequence 18 always contains stunning surprise to not seventeen not nineteen eighteen in every movie that works for audiences in other words every hit movie that you can analyze because it's doing something right this is the pattern and then in act 3 it's the only act where it can vary where the numbers can vary and in act 3 you have between 2 & 5 hero goal sequences I don't recommend five five is good movies have been made with five like as good as it gets which has to be you know one of my favorite romantic comedies kind of stuff it has five here we go sequences in rather extended act three but the audience is getting antsy and it's time to get out by then I I the standard the average of movies that work is 2121 here with goal sequences eighteen four acts one and two and then another three in act three this is a way I know it sounds kind of weird and mathematical at this point but this is a way of quantifying change it tells you in advance this must happen in these few pages there it also goes beyond that I mean people were asking you well and what specifically happens in each one of these can you nail that down in a general way yeah I do that in the book you know I said well these things usually happen in here real goal sequence number four you know that kind of stuff but that's up for grabs and up for people to play with but structurally the bones are these 2223 hero goal sequences laid out in this exact way and they don't change but I think the parts that that cause people that make people the most curious have to do with our analysis of a movie of the week and that when we first wrote the book there were a lot of movies of the week in which we talked about the seven act structure of a television show and the 7x structure you know there is a 3x structure or two stories all stories have a three-act structure but in the Renaissance for example stories had five acts and that's because they divided the horrible act to that everyone hates I call it the Serengeti Plain because it's you know it's the hardest part of the writing they divided it into three acts and now there's a five acts story and it's easier to write because each act has some beginning middle and end and each act can be subdivided into twists and turns and scenes so television goals goes even further and makes it seven acts and that's because of commercials that have to come after each act etc so people were curious to see that but when they saw that that the executives at the studios actually had a chart some of them actually took the chart into a pitch meeting and wrote down jotted down what you know in the chart what the writer with the pitch was saying about what happens in each act and so on so here's the filled out one I'm based on a movie that we produced and it shows one liners of the scenes that occur in each act and I think people realized that this was they didn't realize how mechanical it was and honestly when I hear that which I do often from writers when I'm in the Old Lace at least when I was teaching at university extensions all over the country I realized that they didn't have them in hella D to be writers so maybe given a great example well mama named Millie Mayer god rest her soul wonderful wonderful lady was a client for years came up to me at a Riverside UC Riverside workshop after and she goes I didn't want to say anything in front of the classic I didn't want people make fun of me but I took my favorite book The Grapes of Wrath and I outlined it and that stupid and I said no you're the only craftsman in the class I mean that's what a carpenter would do if he wanted to make a table he would take a table apart and see how it was put together that's what a mechanic would do if he wanted to build an engine he'd take an engine apart so that's exactly what you do and that when they see this kind of breakdown they understand you know exactly how the mechanics of it work and honestly until you get to that point you're really not ready to be a professional writer because if you thought that writing was a magic you know magic trick that you have to pull off every time or a miracle which I guess most writers probably would think a miracle rather than magic trick then it's impossible right but it's not possible I mean unassign impossible it's possible to be a writer people have been writers for centuries they've been storytellers and and storytellers tell stories in parts and they know what the parts are and they do them in a way that makes sense and so the sooner you get down to the mechanics of how it works the better and that's what we try to do when our books is to show people the mechanics I'm looking through for another there's another page in here where we show what we call an intensity chart where you kind of type one-liners of your whole story on it on a single piece of paper one-liners of all the important scenes in the story then you go between the lines and let's say you put hyphens two hyphens for a non dramatic scene or a scene with relatively little drama and like five hyphens for a scene with much more drama and ten hyphens with maximum drama right so now you've got a page that has all these hyphens on it underneath the sentences right then you draw a line across the hyphens connecting the hyphens and then you turn it on its side you turn the piece of paper on its side in which you've got is something that looks like a rollercoaster and because it shows you the ups and downs and your story's based on the drama the intensity of the drama in your stories and that is a great diagnostic tool because if you see that there's a whole slope that in which the thing keeps going down down down and doesn't go up for a while or it levels off then you know you need to work on that part of your story so that's what I call the mechanical approach you know what I mean by mechanics like when you when you want it outline a screenplay or a book you just use three three by five cards and you put on those three by five cards the obligatory scenes in the book and you won't fill up a whole card because it'll just be a couple of words on each card and what you understand when you start doing that is that creation of the literary work is what araceli called an imitation of reality it's not reality you're not rebuilding the cider house and the world around the cider house you're faking it you're making the reader believe it's there and you do that mechanically by like I would if I were making the movie I build a house front that looks like this outer cider house right but it wouldn't have a back because I'm only gonna shoot the front of it so that's what you're doing when you're writing your you're just doing what's necessary to create the illusion that you're trying to create and the audience believes that the lusion is real because it wants to believe that and you've given them enough evidence to make them believe it so you know when you're watching one of the old movies when they were just nobody was dealing with production value the way we do now you know it just takes a little bit to make you believe in the story even if the acting is bad right even if the set is laughable but you still are in the story if the story is good you know if if the characters are good and the dialogue is good and that's one of the things that we try to instill in writers is learn the mechanics of it because it's easier then then you make it you're not having to recreate a whole world your you need to do the right strokes to make the painting look like a person and that's what we try to do and you know the treatment book this this shows you what you know this is what you're doing as you do it you've you're writing little search sentences and you're putting hyphens and then you're drawing a line connecting them all but then when you put it on the side you can see the shape of your story and you can see where it needs some attention you know where that you know there is all these peaks here but no real valleys so it would be much more dramatic if you drop some of the intensity or you added less intense scenes in here so that the rises would be greater etc and you know it could be that everything is just fine when you do this and it looks really perfect but most the time you'll discover that it's not a rollercoaster ride which is what you want you know your reader to go on you want them to to be screening all the time basically and then toward the end you see the highest peak and then it levels down yeah and levels down although you know today's storytelling world maybe this is not the right way to end a story you know it might be better to end on a higher peak so I do have a few moments in time and byte moments in time I'm talking about the first scene and the last scene so we're gonna identify in the first scene what a character wants and then we're gonna have a next moment that identify is what I call the point of no return this is the big event that's gonna push us into the main part of the story it's the event that makes this movie this movie everything else on here is internal to the character the point of no return is the one moment and it's external to the character it's the one thing that has to happen to them so so we're talking about Groundhog Day right so the the point of no return is when he wakes up and discovers it's the same day again right and it should feel like it's this moment makes this movie this movie without that scene you wouldn't have the movie Groundhog Day right it's absolutely essential so it's important like a moment like that that's gonna drive the rest of the story it's also external you notice it wasn't the point of no return is never somebody decides to do something there's an element of fate that is involved when we're looking at the point of no return so of all the elements it's the one thing that's external that had to happen to him he could have not had that happen it woke it up and it was February 3rd and then this movie wouldn't be this movie but for whatever reason he woke up and it was February 2nd all over again that's outside of his control if we were gonna look at the movie Tootsie sometimes people say oh the point of no return is when he goes to audition for the part that's a choice right so the point of no-return needs to be external to the character so I would not identify it as he goes to audition what and what you want to identify is the moment outside of his control so the part where everything really changes is when so he could have blown that audition and he almost blows that audition he comes very close to blowing it but the female producer likes him right and at one point she says I like him I like her we're gonna hire and she leans over and says you got the part I'm sending the contract to your agent that's the point of no-return that because that moments outside of his control right that would had nothing to do with his choice he could have blown that audition he almost did blow up that audition but that's the moment boom now or in the movie known as Tootsie what another thing I like to think of a great example of this is the differences but going from act 1 and act 2 is the Wizard of Oz Wizard of Oz act 1 it's a black and white point of no return is she thinks that a tornado has lifted her house up and dumped her in and Land of Oz and boom weren't Technicolor we want that feeling when we enter act 2 we're in a whole new world wait in Kansas anymore right so it's a whole new world there's facing it's one thing Michael Dorsey decides to audition one day as a woman it's another thing he's got to fool everybody 24/7 into thinking he's a woman that's the main story or in Groundhog Day he's now trapped in a cycle where every day is grandma day that's the main part of the story so they're two kinds of stories I talk about in the book comedy and tragedy and these are not these definitions don't come from Joe blame me if you don't like them they're from Aristotle these are the original academic different definitions of comedy and tragedy so when I say comedy I'm not talking about a haha comedy I'm talking about an Aristotelian comedy and so no Aristotelian comedy according to Aristotle by definition is where we have a protagonist who overcomes a flaw so flaw is gonna be the next element I'm going to talk about and that there they're going to go through change and then eventually they're going to have a happy ending structurally we also have tragedies a tragedy is going to be the opposite so we have the same set up we have the character wants something they get it in a point of no return but instead of going down down down and then coming up and having a happy ending we're gonna go in the opposite direction they're going to go up up up up before they come down and have their sad ending ninety-five percent of stories are gonna be calm based by the way oh yeah at least 95 percent the next important thing to talk about when I talk about the point of no return in the point of no return the character gets something they want they also get something they don't want and that's going to be what I call the cat so give it you want but with the cash so Michael Dorsey gets apart but he's gonna have to dress up as a woman in Groundhog Day Phil Connors only has to spend 24 hours in Punxsutawney that was just one but the catch is it's actually gonna be the same 24 hours done over and over again so the catch is attached so it's a problem we can't just give our character what they want because that deflates conflict so you're giving them something that they want along with something they don't want and the catch is also could be said to be the perfect test of their flaw so the flaw and you know Phil Conners flaw is that he's a self centric this is the that for the catch being that he's going to stuck spending the same same day over and over again it's the perfect test of someone who squaw is that they're self-centered in a comedy it's gonna end in a happy ending but they're gonna go down down down down before because you've got to hit rock bottom before you can make a change so it keep in mind in your typical ha ha comedy and your typical ha ha comedy is an Aristotelian comedy it's down down down now we're laughing as bad things are happening to the protagonists they are not laughing they're not having a good time in act 2 of a comedy so that are going to go down down now until they're gonna hit rock bottom what I call their crisis the crisis has two requirements one is it's their absolute lowest place and then it is the other requirement is that the opposite of the want actually Groundhog Day has a really interesting one in that he's actually finally spent after being stuck there he finally tells the truth to read of the love interest about what's going on and they actually have kind of a wonderful day together but it ends in this very bittersweet moment where they're falling asleep and he's says and the terrible worst part is tomorrow you're gonna think I'm a jerk again and what is wonderful about it is this wonderful irony and that's what we're setting up with the crisis being the opposite this irony he only wanted to spend 24 hours and pucks of time now he wishes the day could last forever because tomorrow she'll think he's a jerk again so we're sending this delicious irony there then the next thing we're going to identify in the nutshell is we're now entering the back three the beginning of act 3 is the climax of your movie and the operative word that we're going to use though is the climatic choice at the heart of a true climax your protagonist is making a difficult decision so in Groundhog Day his choice is to start stop to stop fighting it to accept that he's there and start trying to live every day for the fullest and so he becomes a really good person he starts you know doing nice things and saving the day and doing thinking of others because what's the point in living and trying to have short-term gratitude he's got to find a different experiment with a different way of living so he actually starts becoming this town hero of this person who's that known as this good guy because he's got nothing better to do and then finally break some free of the curse and in the final step the final step is the very last structural element timewise the very last scene in the movie and now the characters gonna come to full circle so if his flaw was that he was self-centered he's come full circle to its opposite strength that he now is selfless and right because he's been doing these things for everybody in the town of Punxsutawney and he wakes up that final day and he's actually it's become February 3rd he's free of the curse and he actually wants to stay so those are the 8 structural elements and so like I said it's not just moments in time this is not a beat sheet method they are what's important is the glue it's the structure that holds these pieces apart it's the connection between these parts these are not isolated moments in time we can see right on the piece of paper what's working what's not and if it's not working how to adjust it by seeing that it fits you know what what do we need to change in order to me the requirements in order to tell a story effectively it originates in Hollywood history by the accident of the one real film 35 millimeter film that became standardized by the first decade of the 20th century the first movies by that by that time let's say that by 1910 there are single real experiences there are 10 minutes long and for various reasons in the teens of Hollywood split in two directions from the single real film to what we call full-length features multi real films hour and after two hours three hours and in the other direction to the serial which is a real or two installments series and the reason you have the origin of sequences is that in the u.s. the distribution system was so rigorously one real a week or two reels a week that when they started to generate full-length feature films they were still distributed a couple of reels a week so if you look at manuals of the time it's been writing manuals they're about 60 titles that came out in the 19-teens on how to write a photo play because the market was kind of wide open and people wanted to write these things you'll get instructions about making sure that each reel has a climax to it so that the audience will be interested in seeing the next reel and then they'll see the next one after that so it was almost like a limited series the feature film by the late teens we are seeing them all the distribution system is changing and you're seeing in theaters what we would normally experience as a feat full-length feature but the the idea of writing by the reels survived into the 20s and 30s and you can see the scene evidence of it in the way the continuity scripts are marked they're often marked by sequence letter sequence ABCD and that is where what we call sequences come the nomenclature comes from what Frank Danielle discovered in teaching in the 80s he discussed the three-act structure in terms of setting up a situation developing it and then paying it off but he found that the students struggled with the middle part of the script because it's intimidating how do you fill up 60 pages in the middle and usually 30 pages to set it up 60 pages in the middle and 30 pages in the third act so he revived this idea of sequences and he said well don't think of it in terms of one you know act of 60 pages think of it as four 15-minute scripts that each one builds on the last and so thus that the sequence approach is born you're not gonna try to tackle a whole 120 pages just figure out these 15 minutes the first one first 15 minutes and then the next 15 minutes then that's gonna really do some kind of major problem for a character so then they're gonna try to explore the next for the next 15 minutes and the the effect is actually very liberating because you wind up not worrying about how you're gonna fill up these pages but more about how you're gonna trim them down because now you've got all this material but it also helps you explore a premise really fully you have a character let's just take a classic dramatic construction character wants something and there's obstacles okay if they under the first act they we know what they want we know what the obstacles are going to be well what is a character gonna do character doesn't know what the movies about character just thinks oh this is this is easy I can solve this so they try something and that's in your conceptualization of the story the character tries the easiest thing that they can try and then the filmmaker the screenwriter comes up with an obstacle why that doesn't work that's maybe 10 15 minutes all right so now they got to try something else what's that gonna be and you can develop it and each sequence has its own integrity ideally the the paradigm is that each sequence is going to have three acts also it's gonna have some kind of setup you don't have to do as much setup because we know the characters but you're gonna have to introduce new circumstances they're gonna try to get something and then it's gonna end with some kind of resolution usually negative because it's positive maybe the movies over but it leads to the next sequence and to the next one and so you wind up with actually a kind of a nested structure because the scenes dramatic scenes have the same three acts that's why I tend to like three acts you can depends on how you define it but if you understand it as working with tension which tension is just putting something in the audience's mind hope and fear the character wants something are they going to get it or not that's what I'm wondering about and if I care about the character then I'm gonna stay tuned because I want to see the answer to that so it's you don't need more than three acts for that you just need to set that up and then you need to develop it and then you get the answer so each act the act set up the whole thing then each sequence has its own ok character wants something and there's problems and then each scene has a character that wants something in there's obstacles so it's like this iterative structure that keeps the audience involved because we're constantly wondering about what how it's going to come out for the character and one thing that we also recover in the in the book down science of screenwriting is this this process of connection to a main character and what the theories are about why we have that and it's certainly important if you come into a if you're at a park and you come in up on a tennis game and two people are really battling each other it may be interesting but it's not gonna be dramatic to you cause you don't know them but if if you do know one if you love one of them and you know that they just mortgage their house and put everything on this game and then you know the other person is a hustler then every my god you something transformational but you have to make that connection emotionally and so so to get back about the sequence structure you have many versions of the new three acts and sequences and then in the scenes and that is the suspense the tension that keeps us interesting and we also we have a chapter on the contrasts in film and that plays also into this approach which is that in order to maintain audience attention the stimulus has to be changed frequently otherwise you you zone out you you'll lose connection you will you'll think about other things and you need to reset the audience's brain periodically and filmmakers do it you can see evidence of it and changing light and dark loud and soft fast and slow but you also see it in tension and release tension maintained for too long it's tedious but if you release it and give us a chance to reset then you can go on and build it up again and again and again until you reach the the culmination of the picture and then finally you try to release it entirely and and then people get people to say yeah I want to see that movie again I'm gonna tell my friends I want to see it generally what I'll do is I'll start with the premise line I'll write out a premise line sort of basically for me like the foundation of the script a couple of sentences take take you know let's start to finish and then I'll expand that into nine or maybe two three four pages those sort of write it in sections so I'll divide it in two into three basically if it's a movie three movie acts but you know a more in quarters so it's like the equivalent of a quarter quarter quarter quarter which takes me through the four quarters or the three acts of the of the movie so it's I can keep it because one of the things that happens when you start writing it for me and when I start writing out and at writing an outline in you know prose form is that you know if you don't if you don't from me if I don't kind of stop you know stop writing at a certain point you know you end up with let's say your outline is for page you're writing it just outlining it four pages the first two pages may really only be the first quarter of your script because you know you you know you end up writing so much and then then you have to really then ultimately you end up with kind of you know disproportionate disproportionate acts so basically I'm just trying to write it as tightly as I can y'all write it long and then I'll then I'll edit it but in the end I want to end up with kind of four relatively close descriptions of each quarter okay so let's say that's that ends up being three four pages whatever then if it's on if it's an assignment then I'll then I'll give it to the executive or whatever I'll get notes on it rework it and then if it's not for me I'll do the same thing for myself and then what I do is I divide the and this was a you know really I have to credit writers boot camp for this because they're really this was kind of the way they taught me how to do it and how I always do it now and I taught other people and I I think it's pretty I mean it's it's one of those things that's just sort of like I don't think it's on uncommon way to do it but it kind of boils it down to I think a really effective way of doing it is that you divide I divide it up into 12 sequences three sequences in the first act six and the second act and three in the third act of equal weight so basically you know if you're writing 120 page script or you know it's ten page as a sequence if you're right you're more like 100 page script it's eight or nine pages of sequence and I beat out the list of scenes so I'll take a right turn I create a sequence sentence you know so this is sequence one two and three so out of that sequence sentence that I write right out pulled from the outline the longer outline I then write a list of the scenes that will comprise that that that that's sequence so I'll put like with the scenes in a row and then I'll figure out how many pages that scene will approximately be so that I can add it up add up each sequence and say at the end those six scenes will equal eight and a half pages or something and it's an estimate it may sometimes I'm very off but it's an estimate and this is just my kind of organized way of doing it you know and and how I don't get lost in the process you know and how I really kind of stay on track this is just mine everybody has the way of doing it and so I do that so ultimately you end up with basically twelve series of single obscene lists so at which should eat ultimately when you add it all up should equal you know whatever your page desire page count is one hundred one hundred and five pages under twenty pages an estimate and then I take that I put that on to my final draft that lists on to my final draft and I create a slug line over each one you know interior living room night exterior you know baseball field date whatever and and so I have the line and then I you know the what the what the scene is about and then I had the slug line so basically what I end up with is a whole written script except with that dialogue essentially and then you go in and just you know you craft it and to me it's just it's a very step-by-step process so it's like an accordion you're constantly expanding that accordion until you have the whole script written so that that that works for me but everybody does differently template that's followed by most commercial films and it breaks a story a film narrative into four acts act 1 act 2 a act to be and act 3 and it contains four major story engines that drive each one of the individual acts and eight to twelve major signpost plot beats it's not deciding what you will write it's providing a form and a template with which the writer pours their story into so a writer still makes their own unique creative decisions but they may want to think about what page ranges those decisions fall in and the kind of basic beats that would inform the storytelling okay where do you think many new writers go wrong in terms of the map in terms of the layout what where most new writers weak in that structure often it's over writing to the point where those beats are falling too late like I mentioned the inciting incident should probably be between 8 8 to page 8 to 12 but we also want something that I call the strong movement forward the next major beat to be in the page 18 to 20 range sometimes that doesn't happen until 28 and then the true end of act 1 which should be around page 30 is in the beginner script not happening until page 38 and that really makes the reader anxious and it slows down the pace of the story and the structure so it's not hitting the proper page ranges again this isn't deciding what you should write but it's deciding basically what page range is the major beats should be how you should tell the story to some extent okay kind of that outer frame of the story with which you're pouring your uni unique decisions into but as far as mistakes there's a major signpost beet falling too early too late or just not being there for example there's a beet that I call the assumption of power or declaration of war beat and this should happen around page 75 and you can see it in movies that happens around minute 75 if that's not there if there's not that moment where this character really feels their true power and acts in a way that makes them rise to the occasion in kind of a declaration of war or an attack and a declaration of intent and something that taps their inner strength if that's not happening in that page range I don't think the story is necessarily moving as it should so a classic example would be in the Karate Kid the show-me paint house moment show me paint the fence show me Sand the floor and it's that moment at which Daniel Larusso realizes he's been learning karate all along even though mr. Miyagi has been making him do all his chores so he asked him to show him the the positions that he's put his hands as he's been doing these chores and it turns out he's been learning karate this whole time so he really Daniel really realizes his true power realizes he can do karate and he's doing it already you want every scene to advance the story to explore the controlling theme or reveal crucial character okay it has to advance the story so definitely that first one it has to do in some way and then ideally it will also be on theme that major theme that central theme that this particular story is exploring and then third does it reveal some crucial character you know something that we haven't seen before about this particular character I think it is you know I think structure is very important in hitting those page points is important if for no other reason because every reader in Hollywood has internalized that structure but I mean the real proof in the pudding is that when you read pro scripts buy produced writers by the top writers in Hollywood who are making the top money they use this structure so there has to be something about it that is the reason why the first act of a movie is around 30 minutes there's something there there's some reason why that works I've worked with clients as a coach you know consultant and help people do this and help guide them through the process but I also do it myself as a writer and I do think that the save the cat book and its tools are helpful I mean I my favorite thing about saving the cat really are the 10 genres and working with and they each have like 5 sub genres each that he goes into in the second save the cat book save the cat goes to the movies those genres I think are super helpful and very original and revolutionary for writers coming up with ideas for a movie so I highly recommend those but he also has the beach heat which is the thing that saved the cats most known for which is the 15 point structural paradigm which I think was Blake Snyder building on other paradigms people had for 3x structure going back to probably Aristotle but certainly Syd field and other people's sense that and I think he came up with some really good ideas for here's what the first half of act two of a movie usually looks like any but the second half of back to usually looks like and here's what the second half of act 1 tends to look like let me came up with fun names for these different structural beats or sections in a movie so I think that is a helpful tool some people don't like it and you know or have a love/hate relationship with trying to like fulfill especially when it's like it has to happen on this page or that page which I'm not super strict about but but I do think he had some pretty good arguments for why he felt this is a good page Langer this is a good place in the movie for certain things to happen so anyway when you do up one of those beats sheets it ends up being like a four-page document I think ideally we're so what that means is you're not spelling out every single scene you're not figuring out every single thing that happens in your movie yet because that would take 10 or 15 pages there's no way to really do that in 4 pages if you're trying to do that in 4 pages and I've seen people do it often with the note they're gonna get back is this isn't enough for a movie there's not enough scenes here it's not enough that it's happening for this to fill two hours so it's really about kind of summarizing the key sections of the movie and then the key points like the midpoint and the breaking neck - and the Brainiac 3 which are just moments you know you kind of figure out what those moments are and then you summarize the sections in between so you kind of have an overview of the structure so that was one of Blake's Lake Snyder's big contributions the and I and I think it's helpful so I I will use that as one method for kind of working toward a structure I think there is some truth to that that people are a lot of times saying the same things in different books and different paradigms for story and screenwriting but I also think people do come at it differently and sometimes have different conclusions about you know some of the precepts that they come up with I mean like for instance the dramatical theory of story which I've played with a lot over the years has a pretty different and specific take on how stories work compared to you know save the cat and like the hero's journey the Christopher Vogel book that is my understanding is that's a certain kind of story he's talking about which is a hero's journey type story which not every story is a hero's journey type story but if you're writing that that book really goes into kind of what the the structural points tend to be in those kind of stories and but yeah I do think to a large extent people are speaking about the same things like most people agree that like the end of act 2 of a movie about 3/4 of the way through there's usually a major defeat crisis all is lost moment and then there's a one last kind of chance in the third act to solve whatever the main kind of problem of that story was and they might call it different things but they kind of are talking about the same thing the first speeches I ever wrote for or for TEDx Orange Coast I wrote eight of them and I was like what I'm doing you know I know how to tell a story but I didn't really know how do you get the person's life from point A to point B to the end right and so I would get halfway through the script and by the way I'd turn around a lot of the scripts in two to three weeks eight of them Wow so I didn't have much time and I was working seven days a week and like a I'm gonna figure this out oh my goodness right and so the rules were I was anti rule really and then one day I was working on it on a speech for this TED talk one of them and I wanted to do this woman justice I just adored her her name is Amy Purdy and she and I were collaborating together and I just thought I've got to do this justice what how do I tell a story you know we were in there we were doing stuff but it just wasn't hitting the mark and so I said okay Google let's locate magic 8-ball let me just show it and see what comes back and I just typed in story arc and all of a sudden I clicked on images and I saw something called the hero's journey I was like you know what I feel like I've heard about that before what is this crazy thing called the hero's journey and I looked at the visual it's a beautiful visual somebody taken their time to really show me all the steps and I was like wait this is how I this is how this works I can do this this is exactly what I need Amy had eight minutes TED talks are off in 18 minutes but she only had eight minutes that's what they gave her and some of my other speakers had 12 minutes and you know which four minutes is a huge difference let me tell you eight is tight and so I was like I can do this I can cross the threshold with her story this is wonderful and we did it and her talk went viral and so this was back in 2011 and it was affirmation for me and I was like I don't know these Hollywood people this way but I love them and so then I started following that for certain people I started using the hero's journey and because there are their emotional beats in there and I noticed that my speeches were following those beats I would just look over I'd be like is this going the way it is I would find it I would just mirror them and they could almost cross math and what was beautiful about that is that the the people I tend to work with the speakers I tend to work with and especially now now that I've been doing this a long time I'm really I really want beauty out in the world and I want my speakers to disseminate that that beauty which I already have in them right and the hero's journey really does that because the audience doesn't hear the speaker they hear what the speaker has been through but they only think about themselves and what they've been through in relation to what that speaker has been through so you know speakers will be like I don't know if I could say that and I'm like it's not about you the audience is gonna say oh my god - you know or my mother went through that or someone I knew or you know and they they start to they hear your story but in relationship to themselves and so that that hero's journey has been incredibly important in in in the storytelling process it has to deliver the dramatic question you know ideally there is a protagonist who has a very clear objective ideally there are stakes so there are consequences if that protagonist doesn't succeed and the higher the stakes the more dramatic the story ideally there is a scene and there's a whole book save the cat but it's kind of based on that ideally you have given the audience a reason to side with that protagonist which a lot of movies and scripts leave out completely which is amazing to me because it's one of the main ingredients why would I as an audience care if that character sees his father before he dies you know there must be something that shows me a humanity inside of that character it can be a bad bad mafia serial killer whatever guy but something that I can relate to where we share our humanity in that moment so that he becomes the vehicle for me to discover things about myself in the end I think that's the secret that every audience it's a very that's a very selfish process I think every audience really comes to the theater to learn something about themselves and not about Oklahoma or space or whatever but about their emotions in that moment but that only works if you can create a connection between the protagonist and the audience earlier so that would probably be the formula of looking for is there a connection is there a clear want which leads to the dramatic question which is will this protagonist successfully save the love of his life whatever whatever and then you go into the second act where there are where you have to look at the conflicts is there enough he is what he steps he is doing are they escalating in a way that at the same time is believable but also doesn't need too much patience because in real life you would probably first phone his grandmother and then he would go then we don't want to sit through all that we want the condensed version we want the fake version but we wanted to feel emotionally real which is a hard thing to achieve but it was something that you can very clearly track throughout a second action I think and the first half of the second act normally traditionally is called like the fun and games part which is where most the see of the scenes that you see in a trailer are in the first half of the second act where the promise of the movie the reason why people came is to see those scenes you know it's like oh there's a man that talks to his snake melt Mel Gibson with this beaver and Jodie Foster's movie you know that would be the first half of the second act where we kind of have a little bit of time the clock isn't taking quite as fast yet and then most of the time the mid-point halfway through the story is a more fundamental twist to the whole story it turns out the beaver is real or it has whatever whatever you know can actually talk of something that changes our whole look on the story in the direction of the story which i think is super important because otherwise the second act gets very long like if it's only a one directional thing which exists of course it exists successfully but it's very hard to execute to keep the audience's attention without something that in the middle kind of breaks the movie up and gives it a whole different direction and a lot of time like in a spy movie it would be our protagonist finds out that the agency he is working for is actually the bad guys volatile so 70 is or in Mad Max it's when they've been driving into that one direction and now they have a chief whatever they need to achieve another literally turning around coming back that would be kind of the midpoint then the stakes have to be raised in the second half of the second act and lead to the major confrontation then if you go by the hero's journey which I believe in a lot Joseph Campbell and all that kind of stuff there is the major confrontation it looks like the hero is going to die he metaphorically dies sheds his old ego learned something about himself that he didn't know before there's most of the time painful and that enables him because he doesn't break at that moment he almost breaks you get him to the breaking point and you can see that in almost every movie that that is being done because we need to really break a character to see what he's made of right if you never challenge a character you don't know what he really has inside of so you almost break him and in that process of staring death in the face metaphorically or the office in a romantic comedy it would be the girl is dating another guy you know it doesn't have to be death literally but it's the death of that so now our protagonist learns something about himself that was in his flights but that he didn't know before which now enables him to be to use that as a tool to change that's why character arcs and development are so important become a different person and that enables him to achieve the goal that he hadn't been able to achieve before nowhere in the third act where most of the time he has to defend where he's where he is challenged by the antagonistic force that he's been battling throughout the second act one last time and that's where the big dragon or Sauron or whatever we know rears his head for the first time a text and that he has to prove that the change that he just went through is a permanent one that can be challenged and he won and will still survive with his old ego end of story so there will be at least the there's been a thaller G that thousands of years old you know paradigm that stories are building you can go away from that paradigm as much as you want but I think it helps to know that that is what audiences intuitively are expecting and someone who does that really great is Tarantino like I don't think there's anyone who knows this story structure better and messes with it and messes with your expectation which is great but it's different from not knowing it and just writing something into the blue and then wondering why people don't I follow the characters or aren't hooked to certain development or something like that so that would be my my formulas structure that I can if I'm if I'm reading it and I'm engrossed then it doesn't matter you know if it's a three-act structure or whatever but if I feel like my attention kind of drifts and I don't really care most of the time the answer is in that structure that somehow it doesn't deliver what it needs to deliver some rating teachers say the three-act structure is dead it's it's it's remedial its it it's it's not going to it's it's going to kill any creativity and the problem with that is that they don't understand what the three-act structure is because the three-act structure is has nothing to do with plotting in my opinion and unfortunately the a lot of story structure is taught by story analysts who are sort of brilliant left brain left brain errs and are really adept at deconstructing a masterpiece and and sort of the implication is that now that we've deconstructed this you should go off and write your masterpiece and while there's tremendous amount of value in in in studying film theory or you know film theory because it's that that's that's you know deconstructing Casablanca or Citizen Kane is is going to help you understand how a story was built some degree but it's not going to teach you process it's not going to teach you how to organize your ideas when you look at a movie like Casablanca and you think about the Epstein brothers writing you know we're structuring this this movie they I'm interested in in the process I'm interested in how did somebody come to write this in other words you can you can sort of like just because you deconstruct something you so it's like vivisection you can't you can't take something dead and look at all of its existing parts and then and then reanimate it it's not going to come back to life and so just because you can break down this thing into its it's sort of separate parts doesn't mean you're going to uncover the mystery of what the thing actually is in other words story structure is really the DNA of your protagonists transformation that makes sense the story centers the DNA of a protagonist transformation it's not you know in the midpoint there should be a reversal like I don't even know what that means you hear it all the time with with these story analysts that should be reversible what the hell does you know does does It's a Wonderful Life have a reversal that's where mr. Potter offers Jimmy Stewart a job and Jimmy Stewart says no I don't know I I don't I think of I think of story structure as not a conceptual model something we can figure out but it's it's more of a experiential model in other words your protagonist goes through a series of experiences that lead to a transformation and I think if story structure as an immutable paradigm for a spiritual transformation okay it's immutable it never changes but that doesn't make it that doesn't that doesn't limit your creativity that actually paradoxically opens your creativity in other words when when you really understand what story structure is it moves you beyond your limited imagination of what your story is I always tell my writers your idea of your story is not the whole story it's not that it's incorrect it's that it's incomplete and so if you were to distill story structure to three words it would be desire surrender transformation so show me any story there's you're gonna have a character that wants something desire you're gonna have a character that lets go of the meaning they made out of their goal surrender you're gonna have a character that experiences transformation in other words a shift in perception a reframing of their relationship to their goal show me a story that doesn't have that and I'll show you a story that doesn't work you know or is really experimental

Channel: Film Courage

Views: 65,617

Rating: 4.9466667 out of 5

Keywords: screenplay structure, how to structure a screenplay, story structure, 3 act structure, michael hauge structure, eric edson structure, screenplay sequences, sequence structure, hollywood structure, Screenwriting tips, screenwriting advice, screenwriting 101, how to write a screenplay, screenwriting techniques, filmcourage, film courage, interview

Id: _D7fxkvsUUw

Length: 72min 37sec (4357 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2020