After presenting the initial iteration of this work, I realized that it needed more context to make sense. The three act structure specifically needed to be further elucidated for the cards to make sense, and to give audiences a way to reorder them. I did a quick survey of literature about story structure and settled on using two sources: Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Both authors break down story structure to help readers understand the beats, or moments, that create a story. Snyder’s work is very much focused on Hollywood genre films written for a general audience. His formula breaks down screenplays to the point where beats have specific page numbers and he is very specific in the action that should take place during each beat. Campbell on the other hand, uses myths and stories from ancient Greece to the present and from all over the globe, to demonstrate that all stories have a universal structure made up of three acts, each of which serve to propel the hero’s journey forward.
I chose to use them together because I found an interesting convergence in their points of view as practitioner (Snyder was a prolific Hollywood screenwriter and teacher) and academic (Campbell’s book is a heavily academic survey of world mythology). I also chose them because they are both highly popular works, but they are also not without controversy.
Snyder’s book is seen by some as a “paint by numbers” approach to screenwriting that produces formulaic and prosaic screenplays. Campbell has been criticized for oversimplifying the complexity of the works he cites, and for leaning heavily on Freudian psychoanalysis in his explanations of human behavior. To my mind, both of their perspectives are instructive and compelling, but I felt that if I could combine the two, I would have something that was more solid in terms of depth than Snyder’s approach, but also more accessible and modern than Campbell’s.
Campbell divides the hero’s journey into 17 parts, while Snyder himself has created his own “beat sheet,” a 15 moment play by play of what should go in each section of a screenplay, down to the page where each should occur. To my mind, Campbell’s approach is appropriate for the analysis of mythology (his main focus) but too bloated and repetitive for film, while Snyder’s is too rigid of a framework to permit experimentation or much originality.
After analyzing both theories of story structure, I created a flexible, eight-beat system that is divided into three acts: three beats in the first, four in the second, and two in the third. I then created cards with a very top-line description of the action in each beat.
