Lessons from the Screenplay

[ivyfic]

Lessons from the Screenplay breaks down the structure of movies or scenes. It is very much using the vocabulary of 3-act structure, inciting incident, etc. Structure is one of those things that many new writers struggle with—you know something is wrong with your story, but you don’t know what. And though the majority of Hollywood films follow a VERY strict structure, unless someone has pointed it out to you, it can be invisible. This is definitely one of those you have to learn the rules before you can break them things, for storytelling in general, not just films. This channel relies heavily on The Anatomy of a Story by John Truby, and other books that lay out the “rules” of good structure. (I read that book and hated it, but that’s a separate rant.) Structure is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but it’s instructive to see the analysis applied to a wide variety of movies. In this video, he compares Black Swan and Whiplash for how they tell the story of an obsessed artist.