#outling

OK. Let’s go.

Act 1 (Roughly first 25% or less)

Opening Image: We see the character where they are starting from in normal life and the tone it set. This will often be a deliberate mirroring of the Closing Image. (If you’ve seen the 1988 Dangerous Liaisons, this is done really well. We open with the Marquise de Merteuil at her dressing table, putting on her persona, and the last shot is her wiping her makeup off, all of which says so much about her and her world.)

Inciting Incident: Something happens to start the protagonist down his/her path. If this is a romance, this is the couple meeting. If it’s a procedural, the detective gets the case. In adventure, the hero receives a poke to start his adventure.

Plot Point 1: This is the moment that changes everything. The protagonist only has one direction available. In Star Wars, it’s the Empire destroying Luke’s home and killing his aunt and uncle, so he literally can’t go home anymore. In Black Hawk Down, it’s the literal title event—the Black Hawk goes down.

Act 2 (Roughly 50% or more, split in half around the aptly named Midpoint)

Pinch 1: This is a thematic reminder of what the story is about. The point of the Pinches is to apply pressure to the protagonist and keep the story from bogging down. (See Pinch 2 for more.)

Midpoint: If the trajectory of the story has been positive up to this point, things should start going wrong, and if the trajectory has been down, this is when things start trending up. I once heard the Midpoint described as the moment when characters stop asking questions and start coming up with answers. Frequently, this will be a big crowd scene or party. In Fellowship of the Ring, this is the Council of Elrond: All the free peoples of Middle-earth have gathered to discuss the problem of the Ring; they debate the feasibility of walking it into Mordor; a better plan is formed and implemented. The second half of the movie starts. (Aside--in the larger story of LOTR, this is Plot Point 1. Really well structured continuing series will do this, and it's awesome.)

Pinch 2: Another thematic reminder of why any of this matters and an application of pressure to keep the story moving. To use Star Wars again, Luke and Gang once more clash with Stormtroopers, which is thematic of fighting the Empire, and unifying because both times it’s Stormtroopers. (In an adventure romance I’m outlining right now, I do pretty much the same thing. Both Pinches involve battles scenes that don’t go great for the lovers because of the antagonist.)

Plot Point 2: There’s a dramatic reversal, and it’s usually very bad. Sometimes referred to as the Dark Night of the Soul, things are never worse for the protagonist. Very specific romance structures will sometimes differentiate between Plot Point 2/Dark Night of the Soul and the Break Up, but it’s essentially that moment. It’s Elizabeth Bennet, dealing with the fact her dumbass sister has run off and she knows that Mr. Darcy is in the world thinking ill of her.

There is an alternative to a Dark Night of the Soul, turning this into a moment of “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.” For an example, um, see Network.

Act 3 (Roughly 25% or less)

Showdown: Shit is now going to happen and get figured out for good or ill. The protagonist and the antagonist come face-to-face. Final battle, hero running through a crowded city to kiss his beloved on New Years Eve, etc.

Resolution: The hero’s problem is solved, either positively (we’re getting married!) or negatively (oops, I’m dead or dying), depending on the type of story you’re telling.

Closing Image: The final summation of your characters and themes and what you’ve been trying to say in a single shot/line/paragraph/chapter/epilogue. Bonus points if it mirrors the opening shot. (Examples: TE Lawrence on the road, Eleanor leaving to mirror her arrival in Lion in Winter.)

(Watch the video interview on Youtube here)

Screenplay Structure Is The Enemy by Marty Lang via FilmCourage.com.

Film Courage: How has the screenwriting Master’s program transformed your screenwriting process? What do you do differently now?

Marty Lang, Screenwriter/Professor/Director: Well, I think a lot more about the structurefrom the very beginning than the way that I used to do it. Previously if I had an idea for a movie I would just start writing and just sort of see where it went and sometimes good things would come from that. There definitely is a benefit to sort of free writing and just kind of seeing what comes from it.

But my experience has taught me that spending time to outline an idea before actually writing it makes the writing much more efficient. I’ve saved multiple drafts of screenplays because I’ve gone and outlined ahead of time and I figured out the major turning points of the film and that sort of thing. That’s something I really didn’t do beforehand because I sort of rebelled against it. I thought that structure is the enemy and the thing that I’ve learned is that structure is your friend. It helps point our errors before you get to them and it helps you stay on track.

If you know what the next thing is that you’re writing toward, it’s a lot better if it’s five pages away then if it’s 50 pages.

So you know you have a specific thing to write to, your scenes have more urgency, your scenes have more conflict as a result of that. So I think that’s the biggest thing that I’ve learned.

The other thing that I sort of picked up along the way is that the more personal you can make your stories and the more raw you can make them I think the more effective they are for the reader.

The story that I wrote about my dad, there were some really dark things that were in there. And it’s not a dark film per se. It’s a drama but really laying there some emotional things that I had dealt with a long time ago, it really helps with the writing. It makes it more engaging, it makes it more interesting for the reader.

The more you try to cover up sort of the raw things that your characters are dealing with the less interesting it becomes. So I think it’s kind of good to lay it all out there. It’s kind of a form of free therapy.

Film Courage: I know you’d said in another class from another professor that they talked about deciding what kind of protagonist you really want to focus on. Did you start to see parallels in who you wanted to write about?

Marty: And you know it’s funny, I have and I see...(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).

See Film Courage’s collection of Writing and Filmmaking and Acting videos on Youtube.