https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots#The_plot...
One related thread is John Truby’s Anatomy of Story. His system is a 'story structure grows out of the hero’s weakness, desire, opponent, moral choice, and self-revelation.' And he then catalogues variations and popular versions of each of those ingredients.
He also has a follow on book that that goes even further toward what this project is doing. He treats genres almost like deep story forms with specific tropes: myth, horror, detective, comedy, action, fantasy, crime, love story, and so on each have their own worldview.
It's like one mans version of TVTropes, but with a underlying structure, more than a catalogue.
Reading Truby break down stories is pretty entertaining.
The world of narrative non-fiction also has their own versions of these structures. Storycraft by John Hart is a good guide.
On a more critical note: separating a story (diegesis) from the telling (narrative structure) is like reducing animals to skeletons, disregarding the sinews, fascia, nerves, flesh, and fluids that make up an animal.
For example, describing Alain Robbe-Grillet's "La Jalousie" as a story about a man who suspects his lover of adultery is reductive to the point of atrocity. That particular novel tells the story using pioneering metafictive techniques and reducing it to its narrative types would yield very little insight.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces
https://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Supe...
Edit: typo fix + "execs" added
I'm totally at a loss as to any of the content itself, or the method, or the results. And I've never really heard of any of the films either. But I'm just looking at it and I can 'smell' that there is something here. Man, I really hope this is not a hallucination or some AI slop.
[0]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%A9ma_narratif (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%A9ma_quinaire is also describing the same thing)
Slaying of a kinsman unrecognized.
Disaster.
Falling prey to cruelty or misfortune.
The Enigma (solving a mystery).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situat...
e.g. in a series there is likely a structure to the season as well as a structure to each episode, as well as potentially longer form structure over multiple seasons
Anyway the site is too clever for its own good and crashes out with a "We hit an error" modal overlay on Safari on Mac, so I'll never know.
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)