[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: What are the seven points of story structure found in every great movie?
Paul Chitlik, Author/Writer: I’m glad you asked that question. It’s a funny thing. Writers when they first started writing movies sometimes relied on the basic structure that Aristotle pointed out for plays 2500 years ago. There’s a beginning, there’s a middle and there’s an end.
Movies have evolved a little bit more so that they have found a definite structure that works for just about any kind of movie. Now there are two different kinds of structures that have been employed in movies. One is the seven-point structure and the other is a 12-point structure. I’ll go into that a little bit.
The seven-point structure is:
-You write about ordinary life of the character
-We get to meet the character
-See who that person is
-See why that person needs to change (because movies are about a character going through a journey of change).
The second point is:
-The inciting incident
-This is something that happens from the outside to the character
-Compels them to make a decision eventually that they know they need to make a change.
The third point is:
-At the end of act one something happens to your character again that forces him to make that decision to have a goal and a…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
About:
Paul Chitlik has written for all the major networks and studios in English and in Spanish. He was story editor for MGM/UA’S “The New Twilight Zone,” and staff writer for Showtime’s sitcom “Brothers.” He has written features for Rysher Entertainment, NuImage, Promark, Mainline Releasing, and others. He has directed episodes and been coordinating producer for “Real Stories of the Highway Patrol” and “U.S. Customs Classified.” He wrote and produced “Alien Abduction,” the first network movie shot on digital video for UPN. He wrote, produced, and directed “Ringling Brothers Revealed” a special for The Travel Channel. (He had been a roustabout for Circus Vargas years earlier.) Most recently he wrote, produced and directed “The Wedding Dress,” for Amazon Prime. He received a Writers Guild of America award nomination for his work on “The Twilight Zone” and a GLAAD Media Award nomination for “Los Beltrán,” a Telemundo show. He won a Genesis Award for a Showtime Family movie. He has taught in the MFA programs of UCLA, the University of Barcelona’s film school ESCAC, Cuba’s film school EICTV, Chile’s film school UNIACC, The University of Zulia in Venezuela, The Panamerican University in Mexico City, The Story Academy of Sweden and as a clinical associate professor at Loyola Marymount University. Now writing full time again and living near his grandson in Chapel Hill, NC, with wife, Beth McCauley.
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