1) 3 Act Structure, Vladimir Propp, Genre

The 3 Act Structure


The three-act structure is a model used in narrative fiction that divides a story into three parts , often called the Setup, the Confrontation and the Resolution.
Some people like to call them beginning, middle, and end, which is not inaccurate. The point of the acts is to make sure that the story evolves and the stakes get higher.


The first act is where all the major characters of the story are introduced, plus the world where they live in, and the conflict that will move the story forward. In Act I, the writer has the freedom to create any setting and reality that he so wishes. It’s in the first pages of the script that he defines the reasoning and logic of the story. This early in the script, anything is possible.


The second act is by far the longest, encompassing half of the movie and taking place between the first and third acts. For some screenwriters, Act II is the hardest one to squeeze out. This happens because after the initial boost of a new story, the writer is left without plot elements to introduce. The story, its characters and conflict are all established. At this point, the writer has created a solid frame for his narrative. Yet he’s still roughly sixty pages away from the ending.


The last act, Act III presents the final confrontation of the movie, followed by the denouement. This act is usually the shortest in length because quickly after the second turning point of the script, the main character is face to face with the villain or just about. Showdown ensues and then conclusion.


VLADIMIR PROPP


Vladimir Propp analysed a whole series of Russian folk tales in the 1920s and decided that the same events kept being repeated in each of the stories, creating a consistent framework. His seminal book, Morphology of the Folk Tale, was first published in 1928 and has had a huge influence on literary theorists and practitioners ever since.


Propp extended the Russian Formalist study of language to his analysis of folk tales. He broke down the tales into the smallest possible units, which he called narratemes, or narrative functions, necessary for the narrative to exist. Each narrateme is an event that drives the narrative forward, possibly taking it in a different direction. Not all of these functions appear in every story, but they always appear in this order.


Propp's work was translated into English in the 1950s, by which time it had become core to the ideas of theorists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, and was used in literary studies, anthropology and semiology. Other narrative analysts extended Propp's thinking on patterns in myth, most notably Joseph Campbell, whose The Hero With A Thousand Faces has become a blueprint for Hollywood film-makers when it comes to constructing a narrative.




GENRE


- a class or category of artistic endeavour having a particular form, content, or technique