Saturday - JC Report + beat sheet

 Today, I wrote JC's report on story structure. I actually read a good amount of Robert McKee's Story. It was a great read. 

·         Inciting Incident – The inciting incident is a moment in the story that sets the protagonist on their quest.  It usually comes at the end of act 1 and is the first major reversal.

·         Progressive Complications – According to the McKee stories must adhere to “law of conflict” meaning that only conflict can move the story forward. point of no return. He calls these progressive complications “points of no return”. The protagonist makes a minor action against the antagonist but to only succeeds in rallying more antagonism, then he takes a moderate action to the same effect before making a more extreme action which again arouses more antagonism. As you can see the conflict grows larger and larger as the story continues.

·         Crisis – The protagonist is faced with a decision. One last action to take which will either save the day or cause him to fail his quest.

·         Climax – One final major reversal which McKee makes clear must be emotional rather than loud and violent etc. It should be easy to understand and require no explanation.

·         Resolution – A chance for the story to tie up any loose ends or to let the audience reach an emotional catharsis rather than leaving them trapped in whatever emotion the climax invoked. In Dan Harmon’s story circle this takes up the final two stages “the character returns to a familiar situation” and “having changed” ().

That is what I learned. I submitted it to JC, I hope I get a first! 

I decided to complete a "beat sheet" for my film after having a brief discussion with JC about what exactly a beat sheet is. I used the beat sheet template found in "save the cat".

It has given me a good idea of how many pages my script should be. 17 pages is my current estimate, however, I expect to trim a few off.