I was taught this the very first day of MFA screenwriting school and will spend the rest of my life refining and toying with story structure. Otherwise your story will be singing the ramblin' blues . . . if you want to know how to create a structure read your McKee. There is no why, only do.
Novels have chapters, features have sequences. Run a sequence too short and the audience will feel cheated. Run a sequence too long and audiences will get antsy. It is difficult to maintain an idea for 90 minutes so you need to be organized. And although you should not write a screenplay, you will be doing all the storytelling work you should be doing in your screenwriting anyway, so don't think you'll be getting out of any writing . . .
Holiday is structured into 8 sequences running 8-12 min for a total run time of 84:30 with credits (or at least at this post). It didn't start out that way.
My Co-producer came to me and said he wanted to do a movie about an abductor of women who fools a naive young woman into falling for him, then drugs her, takes her to Mexico and sells her to a slimy Indian businessman. I agreed, for a number of reasons I'll get into later.
I was interested -- in a car wreck horrified way really -- what sort of person my co-producer thought a women abductor might be. I'd never write a script about such a character because I would have no idea what sort of person I was writing about. So I started asking questions.
The structure of the story developed by me asking my co-producer the question of "What does Graham do?" That is, by asking the Deluezian question of "How does it (he) work?" That is, how does Graham's character work in the story? Graham's actions drive the story, so "What does he do?" is the most important question to ask. More on that later.
For a plot generator, I used the Greek story of the abduction of Helen as my model -- one of the ur-texts of the revenge genre in all its glorious ambiguity. More on that soon.
Originally, I planned on six sequences 15 to 18 minutes each. The six sequences in my diary:
That developed into an excel spreadsheet to create a detailed outline:
By the time we started shooting, I modified the six sequences into eight that breakdown this way --
Each sequence ends with an event for the main characters that moves us forward:
Seq 1 ends when Graham speaks to Anne/Anne lost
Seq 2 Graham drugs Anne/Anne trusts Graham
Seq 3 Graham carries Anne into blackness/Anne drugged, unconscious
Seq 4 Graham leaves Anne/Anne drugged, hallucinates
Seq 5 Graham returns for Anne/Anne runs
Seq 6 Graham loses Anne/Anne goes with Hermit
Seq 7 Graham stops car/Anne waits
Seq 8 Graham crawls away/Anne escapes
The excel outline I developed later was used for editing and later, scoring:
All this began with notes in a diary. The details of what happened sequence to sequence changed as opportunities to shoot both materialized and dematerialized, but the structure of the sequences remained consistent.
You need an outline to begin or you won't even know what time of day to be shooting or who needs to be where and when. It doesn't have to be fancy -- just a starting point. Shooting pictures is the best way to generate ideas for your outline.
