Three Act Structure, Vladimir Propp and Genre

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.

The 3-act structure is an old principle widely related to in storytelling today. It can be found in plays, poetry, novels, comic books, short stories/films , video games, and movies. It was present in the novels of Conan Doyle, the plays of Shakespeare, the fables of Aesop, the poetry of Aristotle, and the films of Hitchcock. It’s older than Greek dramaturgy. it is used by Hollywood and Broadway as well.

Though quite simple, the 3-act structure has proven to be a key concept that is used by any screenwriter. The 3-act structure is a highly accepted and greatly successful method.

 The 3 acts are labelled as:

Act 1: Setup

Act 2: Confrontation

Act 3: Resolution

Some people refer to them as the 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. All acts have their own sets of guidelines and rules that make the foundation of story development.

Act 1: The Setup

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 1, the writer has the freedom to create any setting and reality that they wish to do so. 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 story may happen in the distant future or long time ago in a galaxy far far away, it may be present day, It may take place in a key country/place. The first act also establishes genre. It may be a drama about a mother, father, widow, student, child ect.

Act 1 must also present a strong hook – an exciting scene early in the script that grabs the audience’s interest and hooks them. Act 1 ends with the first plot point of the movie.

Act 2: Confrontation

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 2 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. The writer faces the challenge of keeping the story moving forward and not boring the audience. One device to accomplish this feat is the creation of subplot. The subplot is a minor story layered under the main narrative. It often adds a three-dimensionality aspect to the characters by allowing them to engage in a behaviour that is not necessarily connected to the main plot, but still relevant in the overall narrative and often linked to a central theme. In the second act, the stakes escalate. A pivotal element of this escalation inherent to Act 2 is Plot Point 2, which catapults the story into the third and final act. Much like Plot Point 1, Plot Point 2 also affects the main character by changing the direction he’s headed. The difference is that the stakes are much higher. This is often a moment of crisis, in which all hope seems lost.

Act 3: Resolution

The last act, Act 3 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. The third act is also when the writer ties up any loose ends and offers a resolution to the subplots. The resolution can also give extra information for a more elaborate characters.

Vladimir Propp 

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was a Soviet folklorist and scholar who analysed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements. His Morphology of the Folktale was published in Russian in 1928.

Propp identified a sequence of narrative elements (or 'functions') that typically occurred within Russian fairytale. He identified 31 functions in Russian folklore and fairy tales. These functions occurred in a typical order within each story, with some variation. This type of structural analysis of folklore is the "syntagmatic" manner of assessment (as termed following Lévi-Strauss 1964: 312). Another example of syntagmatic analysis is the Hero's journey. This focus on the events of a story and the order in which they occur is in contrast to another form of analysis, "paradigmatic" (cf. Sebag 1963:75). That describes instead the underlying pattern. For paradigmatic analysis, elements of the plot may be taken out of their "given" chronological order within the story and regrouped in various analytic schemes.

Respectively equivalent to syntagmatic and paradigmatic are the terms "diachronic" and "synchronic". Diachronic covers the sort of analysis that conveys a sense of traversing the highs and lows of a story, like riding the pattern of a sine wave. The second term, synchronic, is where the story is instead absorbed as a whole, like the pattern of a circle. Most literary analyses are synchronic, offering a greater sense of unity among the components of a story. Although both structural analyses convey partial information about the story, each angle of analysis delivers a different set of information.

Genre

Genre (from French genre, meaning 'kind' or 'sort') is any form or type of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially-agreed upon conventions developed over time. Genre is most popularly known as a category of literature, music, or other forms of art or entertainment, whether written or spoken, audio or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria, yet genres can be aesthetic, rhetorical, communicative, or functional. Stand-alone texts, works, or pieces of communication may have individual styles, but genres are amalgams of these texts based on agreed-upon or socially inferred conventions. Some genres may have rigid, strictly adhered-to guidelines, while others may show great flexibility.

A film genre is a motion picture category based on similarities in either the narrative elements or the emotional response to the film. Most theories of film genre are borrowed from literary genre criticism. The basic genres include fiction and documentary, from which subgenres have emerged, such as docufiction and docudrama. Other subgenres include the courtroom and trial-focused drama known as the legal drama. Types of fiction which may seem unrelated can also be combined to form hybrid subgenres, such as the melding of horror and comedy in the Evil Dead films. Other popular combinations are the romantic comedy and the action comedy film. Feel-good is not a genre.