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<\/a><\/div>\nToo fast and the audience can\u2019t follow, too slow and the audience gets bored. On the surface, these look like two very different problems. But both of these directions often have the same root cause: a misunderstanding of the nature of pacing.<\/p>\n
In my last entry<\/a> I covered how the most commonly taught format for story telling, the three act structure, is actually a product of its origins and may not actually be the \u201cmost basic form\u201d. As I described there, novels long ago picked up a structure of their own that worked better for their format when they created chapters. The pacing of a novel depends upon getting a good feel for the length of chapters. The pacing for a comic book depends on understanding that each panel is its own moment in time. The pacing of plays and television shows depend on building acts which peak just in time for the curtain to fall or the commercial to break.<\/p>\n What about the pacing of film? What does film really have to provide it a steady structure? Well for that you have\u2026<\/p>\n When playwrights first came to the form of screenwriting, the three act structure was a thing, but it wasn\u2019t THE<\/b><\/i> thing just yet. It was screenwriters, working from what they knew in their background, who started to make the three act structure vital to the creative process. It helped them figure out the pacing of their story when closing the curtain for a set change became unnecessary – intermissions still happened, but as I pointed out before, for other reasons. The writers\u2019 intermissions were no longer determined by the flow of their plot and their pacing, it was determined by technical limitations. So what they did was create a structure so easily defined that someone could actually draw it.<\/p>\n And there you have the beast itself, the three-act structure. I lifted this one off of Wikipedia<\/a> because I decided early on that it\u2019d be nice to have one with citations. Why would I care about citations for something so universal? That\u2019s the beautiful part: people sometimes have disagreements over the exact shape of the three act structure. Though the overall basics are the same, the minor details can come and go depending on the opinion of whoever\u2019s showing it to you. In fact, for all the versions I\u2019ve run across over the years, there are only five elements of the three act structure that are actually universal.<\/p>\n The first universal point is that there is something called the inciting incident, a point where shit starts happening to our cast of characters. This can be something that shakes up the status quo or even just a minor event that sends people along their way. But inevitably the inciting incident leads to the first turning point, an event which hijacks your characters and takes them to parts unknown. From there, they eventually hit the midpoint, this place in the plot where stuff just starts going wrong rapidly around the middle of Act 2. When you eventually have it as low as it\u2019s going to go, the low point, you\u2019re ready for the second turning point, which is when the character rises from this low point to head into the climax. The climax is your big dramatic pull, the point where everything gets resolved one way or another.<\/p>\n So then how could anyone disagree about the structure? Those five points seem fairly obvious, don\u2019t they? And yet, while you can find those five points I just mentioned on any outline given to you explaining screenwriting, the observant will notice that the picture I shared above actually has ten points labeled. Is that the real correct number? Nope, because another famous outline for writers comes out of Blake Snyder\u2019s book \u201cSave the Cat\u201d<\/a> (also a website devoted to the concept) which features a time specific outline for the structure of a film featuring\u2026 fifteen.<\/p>\n So how is it that all three of these things, which share commonalities but disagree on the specifics, can all exist side by side? The answer lies in the fact that none of these is really showing the real form of a film. Were you to really draw out the structure of a film, the picture above would actually look something more like this.<\/p>\n And there you see the beats.<\/p>\n In this context, beats are just events that move your story along. They\u2019re the smallest named part of creative writing in this format and are fundamental to understanding the pacing of a film. While the three act structure may sometimes come with timestamps (as the two examples above have done), the real backbone of pacing in film comes from your beats. But that\u2019s a bit harder to draw out, because if people were truly honest with themselves about the structure of screenwriting, it\u2019d actually look less like the pictures above and more like this.<\/p>\n And this is because, despite the fact not many notice, there’s a lot more intuition in the process of film making than there is structure. In fact, film is actually a lot more like music than it is like other formats. Your beats set your tempo, too many beats, too fast, and your movie is just noise, too slow and it may just put your audience to sleep. The size and frequency of your beats helps guide your audience through the film and a well paced film featuring just the right number of beats will carry them from beginning to end so long as you stay within bounds of reason. In this way, they\u2019re also a lot like chapters of a book, but with a greater limitation on the resources of time and patience.<\/p>\n It makes sense, when you think about it, that film ends up feeling so much like music. A song doesn\u2019t start off in the full swing – it begins with something a little less complex that eases you into the music. But then, other instruments play or a change in tempo happens and you find yourself experiencing something else. The infamous example in the modern day is the guy who shares his dubstep with you and keeps saying something like, \u201cwait for it.\u201d<\/p>\n And then, BAM, something happens. For a dubstep song it becomes aggressive. For a story, they might\u2019ve just found a dead body or have someone in their family kidnapped. But once that happens, you\u2019re into the real meat of the music and the film.<\/p>\n And this keeps swelling and building until you hit that point where it is just in full swing and people are really feeling what you\u2019re doing. It\u2019s at this point that things might even go\u2026too far.<\/p>\n And then, after you\u2019ve got people drawn in, when they\u2019re ready to follow you down to the bottom, you take them there. But you can\u2019t stay there. You can\u2019t rise once and then fall after that. Music is more complex than that, you have to take them through a few turns. So as you come down from it, it\u2019s time to hit them again. You know, the climax after the low point.<\/p>\nThe Beat<\/span><\/h2>\n
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