This is a very interesting concept. I see in your replies to other comments that you are looking at movies from different cultures, which would be a great test of your idea. Once you have sufficiently advanced, it would be great to look at theatre too. I have a hypothesis that movie-writing began to diverge from theatre-writing in the very late 20th century in terms of structure and writing with the rise of the blockbuster and the emphasis on spectacle, and we lost something after that.
so raagas are like scales? i thought it was just a type of music where the same songs are played by every artist, like blues, so maybe i don't get this idea at all. but is it about the order of scenes in movies? or like which scenes are "allowed" in a movie of a particular genre? in any case, are you familiar with the Aarne Thompson Uther index?
The question we started off with was - if there are scales and raagas for music, is there something similar for storytelling. What goes well after what beat.
That took us through a journey.
Building Quanten Pulse, which led to Quanten Arc (real data, that led to a model), which then allowed us to create a benchmark database of more than 400 films.
So if you breakdown 400 hollywood blockbusters, and break them scene by scene, map emotions and durations, and character arcs, what is the patterns that you see - and if you step back, do you see clusters of patterns that resonate well.
Most people in hollywood write stories in two structures - predominantly. It is either Save the Cat, or the Heroes journey. But what if you don't want to save cats or go on the journey? (imagine if someone telling a musician, you have two scales - thats it).
We took a peek into the 400 and found 15 different narrative structures that work well. I have a feeling as we expand - into regional cinema, and different formats, we will find more.
Seems like a cool idea but it's kinda hard to tell without seeing a whole movie or two fully broken down into those scale steps. Maybe it's there behind a paywall.
Yep, that's definitely on the list. The only issue that I am battling with is how to take something as a positive signal to build these patterns on. Because if i take the entire universe of films, there is probably every variation of arcs. But some have worked / resonated with audiences and some haven't. The way European Cinema has been funded (predominantly through governments) mean that they do the film circuit and then disappear - and the filmmakers are off to make the next film grant. How do i find the signal to identify whats a good film or not.
There was this snide remark that someone in hollywood made where they said, they make movies whereas Europe makes (art) cinema.
I havent figured out how to resolve that yet.
But yes to korean, japanese films - that's very much on the list.
This is a very interesting concept. I see in your replies to other comments that you are looking at movies from different cultures, which would be a great test of your idea. Once you have sufficiently advanced, it would be great to look at theatre too. I have a hypothesis that movie-writing began to diverge from theatre-writing in the very late 20th century in terms of structure and writing with the rise of the blockbuster and the emphasis on spectacle, and we lost something after that.
so raagas are like scales? i thought it was just a type of music where the same songs are played by every artist, like blues, so maybe i don't get this idea at all. but is it about the order of scenes in movies? or like which scenes are "allowed" in a movie of a particular genre? in any case, are you familiar with the Aarne Thompson Uther index?
For individual notes there's https://tvtropes.org
This has been almost 2.5 years in the making.
The question we started off with was - if there are scales and raagas for music, is there something similar for storytelling. What goes well after what beat.
That took us through a journey.
Building Quanten Pulse, which led to Quanten Arc (real data, that led to a model), which then allowed us to create a benchmark database of more than 400 films.
So if you breakdown 400 hollywood blockbusters, and break them scene by scene, map emotions and durations, and character arcs, what is the patterns that you see - and if you step back, do you see clusters of patterns that resonate well.
Most people in hollywood write stories in two structures - predominantly. It is either Save the Cat, or the Heroes journey. But what if you don't want to save cats or go on the journey? (imagine if someone telling a musician, you have two scales - thats it).
We took a peek into the 400 and found 15 different narrative structures that work well. I have a feeling as we expand - into regional cinema, and different formats, we will find more.
Tell me what you think : https://arc.quanten.co/archetype
PS: While we started with Hollywood, we are starting to do this analysis for Bollywood films too (though finding scripts has been difficult)
Seems like a cool idea but it's kinda hard to tell without seeing a whole movie or two fully broken down into those scale steps. Maybe it's there behind a paywall.
We've made a few of that data fully visible. Try this :
http://arc.quanten.co/showcase/film (Anora) http://arc.quanten.co/showcase/series (The Pitt S01E01)
Cool. I would go into the european or auteur films. Also Asian films like wkw.
Yep, that's definitely on the list. The only issue that I am battling with is how to take something as a positive signal to build these patterns on. Because if i take the entire universe of films, there is probably every variation of arcs. But some have worked / resonated with audiences and some haven't. The way European Cinema has been funded (predominantly through governments) mean that they do the film circuit and then disappear - and the filmmakers are off to make the next film grant. How do i find the signal to identify whats a good film or not.
There was this snide remark that someone in hollywood made where they said, they make movies whereas Europe makes (art) cinema.
I havent figured out how to resolve that yet.
But yes to korean, japanese films - that's very much on the list.