Cats and Dogs

Continuing to look at Saving the Cat by Blake Snyder. 

The most important thing is getting the logline right.

But the core of the book is:

The Blake Snyder Beat Sheet 
 
1. Opening Image (1) 
2. Theme Stated (5) 
3. Set-up (1-10) 
4. Catalyst (12) 
5. Debate (12-25) 
6. Break into Two (25) 
7. B Story (30) 
8. Fun and Games (30-55) 
9. Midpoint (55) 
10. Bad Guys Close In (55-75) 
11. All Is Lost (75) 
12. Dark Night of the Soul (75-85) 
13. Break into Three (85) 
14. Finale (85-110) 
15. Final Image (110) 

This is a paraphrase of Blake's own distillation of the "structure" part of his book:

"Hit your act break on page 25, hit the midpoint and All is Lost hard, and have conflict in every scene."

His "Blake Snyder Beat Sheet" is pretty much perfect in our genre world of movies. It's ironic that in our little no-budget world the model is actually the same as the most expensive pictures anyone makes.

There's also a five - step finale, which makes a lot of sense too. It's not as important as the beat sheet. So now I feel like running all our scripts across this beat sheet just to see how they are doing.

There's a quick summary of the book's structure ideas here. It's not really adequate to understand what he's really talking about on its own, but it's a good refresher/introduction.

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I have the first 60 pages of Mozz's rewrite of 0801.