Music has scales / raagas. What about storytelling in movies and prestige shows?

phaedrus044

This has been almost 2.5 years in the making. The question we started off with was - if there are scales and raagas for music, is there something similar for storytelling. What goes well after what beat. That took us through a journey. Building Quanten Pulse, which led to Quanten Arc (real data, that led to a model), which then allowed us to create a benchmark database of more than 400 films. So if you breakdown 400 hollywood blockbusters, and break them scene by scene, map emotions and durations, and character arcs, what is the patterns that you see - and if you step back, do you see clusters of patterns that resonate well. Most people in hollywood write stories in two structures - predominantly. It is either Save the Cat, or the Heroes journey. But what if you don't want to save cats or go on the journey? (imagine if someone telling a musician, you have two scales - thats it). We took a peek into the 400 and found 15 different narrative structures that work well. I have a feeling as we expand - into regional cinema, and different formats, we will find more. Tell me what you think : https://arc.quanten.co/archetype PS: While we started with Hollywood, we are starting to do this analysis for Bollywood films too (though finding scripts has been difficult)

tnelsond4

For individual notes there's https://tvtropes.org

hnhg

This is a very interesting concept. I see in your replies to other comments that you are looking at movies from different cultures, which would be a great test of your idea. Once you have sufficiently advanced, it would be great to look at theatre too. I have a hypothesis that movie-writing began to diverge from theatre-writing in the very late 20th century in terms of structure and writing with the rise of the blockbuster and the emphasis on spectacle, and we lost something after that.

0gs

so raagas are like scales? i thought it was just a type of music where the same songs are played by every artist, like blues, so maybe i don't get this idea at all. but is it about the order of scenes in movies? or like which scenes are "allowed" in a movie of a particular genre? in any case, are you familiar with the Aarne Thompson Uther index?

dadoum

The paragraph in the beginning reminded me of the 5-step story structure I was taught at school, and I just noticed that it is only featured on the French Wikipedia page [0]. In my experience it worked quite well for classical linear stories, and highlighting it in a text back at school also scored a lot of marks during exams, so now I am somewhat trained at recognizing it. [0]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%A9ma_narratif ( https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%A9ma_quinaire is also describing the same thing)

scrumper

Very interesting premise in the title. Something like the seven basic plots of Western storytelling, but built from an Indian perspective? Anyway the site is too clever for its own good and crashes out with a "We hit an error" modal overlay on Safari on Mac, so I'll never know.

larodi

Hm question is who signed off this otherwise apparently Claude produced page.

HelloUsername

Related? "Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots#The_plot...

mycall

In the late 19th century, Georges Polti claimed that all human drama can be boiled down to exactly 36 situations [0]. These are much more granular and include things like: Slaying of a kinsman unrecognized. Disaster. Falling prey to cruelty or misfortune. The Enigma (solving a mystery). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situat...

dharmahound

Related: analysis of 1300 novels found six basic emotional arcs to stories. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0...

carrozo

Worth reading about The Story Circle by Rick n Morty creator Dan Harmon: https://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Supe...

ArekDymalski

This is a very ingenious and interesting idea, presented in an esthetically pleasing way. However two related things make me curious. As the identified registers and arcs are very un-orthogonal how useful they are for your intended users? For example how their workflow/decision making process would look like if they discover that their script matches "The Crucible" in 78% and "The Graceful Endurance" in 82%? Also who is an actual target group? Creators themselves or rather agents, producers, editors and other execs or "gatekeepers"? Edit: typo fix + "execs" added

mistersquid

Consider the field of comparative mythology described by Joseph Campbell in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces". [0] As a side quest, check out James Frazer's "The Golden Bough". [1] On a more critical note: separating a story (diegesis) from the telling (narrative structure) is like reducing animals to skeletons, disregarding the sinews, fascia, nerves, flesh, and fluids that make up an animal. For example, describing Alain Robbe-Grillet's "La Jalousie" as a story about a man who suspects his lover of adultery is reductive to the point of atrocity. That particular novel tells the story using pioneering metafictive techniques and reducing it to its narrative types would yield very little insight. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough

anentropic

It could be interesting to consider nested structures e.g. in a series there is likely a structure to the season as well as a structure to each episode, as well as potentially longer form structure over multiple seasons

quirkot

Maybe there's some technical definitions for the words used to describe the films, but match between archetype and movie is incomprehensible to me. I'm not seeing a single one where the film is where I'd expect based on the descriptions

adamgordonbell

The old version of this question is Aristotle’s Poetics: what makes a story feel like a complete action rather than just a sequence of events? One related thread is John Truby’s Anatomy of Story. His system is a 'story structure grows out of the hero’s weakness, desire, opponent, moral choice, and self-revelation.' And he then catalogues variations and popular versions of each of those ingredients. He also has a follow on book that that goes even further toward what this project is doing. He treats genres almost like deep story forms with specific tropes: myth, horror, detective, comedy, action, fantasy, crime, love story, and so on each have their own worldview. It's like one mans version of TVTropes, but with a underlying structure, more than a catalogue. Reading Truby break down stories is pretty entertaining. The world of narrative non-fiction also has their own versions of these structures. Storycraft by John Hart is a good guide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Truby

Balgair

Wow this is amazing! I'm totally at a loss as to any of the content itself, or the method, or the results. And I've never really heard of any of the films either. But I'm just looking at it and I can 'smell' that there is something here. Man, I really hope this is not a hallucination or some AI slop.