Structure of Literature
- Introduction/Exposition - We get exposed to things like the setting, the protagonist and what the world and character is like normally. It is not as tense yet.
- Rising Action - Causes tension and makes up the bulk of our story
- Climax - It answers the conflict of our story. If we don’t have a conflict our story just goes into a straight line because nothing is really happening
- Falling Action - denouement (french word for it) - tension is being released
- Resolution/Conclusion - Major conflict has been solved and there is a new normal and the world and character has been forever changed.
Freytag was a German scholar who found this pattern in lots of literature all the way back to 500 BC and things like that. An example of a present day work of literature that follows this arch that we also watched in class are Wall-E, Feast, No Country For Old Men and Get Out. In Feast it starts off nice and happy and the conflict rises between the dog and his owners girlfriend and also the climax when the owner and her breakup so Winston runs and gets her. This causes the resolution and they learn to love each other.
I’ve realized that we can not only use this Freytag Arch to not only evaluate movies in class but we can use it to write our own stories or screenplays. It can help make planning out your writing easier if you use the Freytag arch and plan out what the general summary of each step will be. I also noticed that stories I have written in the best naturally fit this form without me even thinking about it and I think most people are like that
Three Act Structure in film - Most films have three acts and eight sequences. There are 2 sequences in the 1st act, 4 sequences in Act 2, and 2 sequences in the 3rd act.
Act 1
1 - Point of Attack
2 - Incident of Attack
Act 2
3 - Lock in Establish main tension
4 - Milestone
5 - Midpoint
6 - New tension started
Act 3
7 - Twist grand focus to personal focus
8 - Character growth that revisits characters
Lots of great details about our learning in class. Nice use of spacing to help organize the different narrative structures. Extension is in the right direction, but it would benefit more from some more precise analysis. I like the idea of your own stories, but give us something specific so we can really see HOW this would be applicable.
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