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Carpark beat sheet

Normality:
Vinnie and Ginger (the two characters at the start) robbing a venue and making their escape. They are inspired by Bonnie and Clyde and are on a crime spree.

Protagonist:
Vinnie (Initially)

Disturbance:
Ginger parked their escape car in a multi-level carpark. They unfortunately get stuck behind an old woman (Marge) in a car who has trouble exiting the boom gates. The police have become alerted to the crime and are closing in on their position.

Plan:
As the old woman finally passes through but too slowly so that Ginger is stuck behind the gates, Vinnie makes the decision to get into Marge’s car and abandons Ginger leaving her to get captured by authorities.

Antagonist:
Ginger vows to get revenge on Vinnie and make him pay for her abandonment.

First-act turning point surprise:
Marge had noticed their crime spree and was testing them under pressure. Marge is a secret criminal looking to put Vinnie to work as her new right-hand man.

Obstacle:
Vinnie works with Marge for multiple months before finding out Ginger was released from jail, and she makes it known she plans to ruin the life of him and the “old bag”.

Reflection:

I found it hard to write this beat sheet without actually going too into depth with the story I wanted to develop and the elements I wanted to include. I still feel even with all the cutting out I did that what I wrote may have still had a bit too much of the story written down rather than just the main beats moving the plot again. I think it’s easy to get ahead of yourself when beginning to develop a story which can possibly lead to the plot becoming over saturated with various ideas making it hard to pick sub-plots to focus on and develop fully. In The 21st century screenplay : a comprehensive guide to writing tomorrow’s films by Linda Aronson, she describes how “a scene is not a beat” and that you might need many scenes to complete a single beat. Based on this description It’s possible my beat’s still contain too much extra details.

The quote by Peterson and Nicolosi “In a story, a beat is a change in the action. If a story is a long chain of little dots connected together, then a beat is one of those little dots’, uses the term ‘beat’ to describe the context of a major event in the story which works to move the plot forward and which directly affects the following beats after it. In the film Miss Congeniality, three beats I have chosen in order to explain the concept is firstly when Gracie is on the case and causes the mission to be messed up which causes her to lose her case privilege which makes her desperate for any case she can get. The next beat would be her coworker trying to convince her into accepting the mission to enter the miss USA pageant for a mission which she does, and needs to undergo training to meet the standards of the competition. Then the next beat would be her entering the pageant with her new transformed look. As we can see these are all major events in the plot without dwelling on the small details in between.

A film I watched recently was The Princess and the Frog. While being a relatively simple to follow Disney film, it can be used as a good example to explain the relationship between the sublot and how it interacts with the main plot/action line. Also known as the B Story or Relationship Line. The main plot of the film is for Tiana to break the curse of her, and Naveen being turned into frogs forever and to get back into their human form. The film also has multiple subplots such as Tiana’s wish to open her own restaurant and another subplot with the romance between her and Naveen. Through out the film, the subplots are directly linked to the main plot in many ways. The romantic interest between Tiana and Naveen grows as they travel together to cure their curse and it becomes apparent that the b story was a vital part of finding the solution to their problem and the restaurant side story being the catalyst for the main plot.

First, I’d like to reflect on my interpretation of the quote from Jane Vandenburgh, “Story tells us what happens, while plot tells us what to make of these events”. While this is still a new concept for me to wrap my head around, I understand it to mean that story is used to convey the tale with the use of the characters, world building, sounds, and shows us what is happening directly. Plot on the other hand, tells us why these events happen and how they interact with each other and are related in a way that makes complete sense. Unlike the story being told to you, with plot there is more intricacies involved like why a character is doing this, what caused this event to happen and why the story ends a story a certain way. Story doesn’t directly explain why this happens and can be up to anyone interpretation, while plot has every event defined.

For my second point, I will be analysing how a film I watched recently kept me hooked in relation to the quote ‘the longer the audience sits, the harder the screenwriter has to work to keep its attention, which means the cleverer/more moving/more unexpected the rising plot needs to be’ (Aronson 2010, 49). A film I’ve recently watched that has kept me hooked was The House Bunny and while this isn’t a critically acclaimed film by any means and is often seen as a shallow chick flick, I still think it was able to hold the audience as the plot progressed. We start off with the protagonist living her dream life and suddenly having it all taken away from her until she meets a bunch of sorority rejects. As the film progresses, we see the protagonist and supporting characters being constantly thrown into new environments with various side stories developing and by the end of the film we see the resolution for everyone finding a balance between their old and new selves, rather than changing completely. If no new concepts, side stories and environments are introduced into a film then it can easily become stale due to a lack of stimulation for viewers. We see appeals to emotion, romance and self development and having these multiple avenues for story to take place means viewers have more variety to keep their attention through out the film.