Plot point 1 is perhaps the most important plot point of all. But the plot points are more than just Act separators, they are major dramatic moments in the story where everything changes. And Act Three is all about story resolution. Act Two is all about confrontation (the hero wants something desperately and he is frustrated by the antagonist forces that oppose him/her). Novels are longer but the proportions between the Acts are broadly the same.Īct One is all about setting up the story: introducing the main character, establishing the dramatic premise (what the story is about), creating the dramatic situation (the circumstances surrounding the action) and the relationships between the characters.
A two-hour movie will normally require a screenplay of about 120 pages (one page per minute). Syd Field placed particular emphasis on what he described as Plot Point 1 and Plot Point 2, which occur and the end of Act 1 and Act 2. These two plot points break a screenplay into three separate acts with three very different narrative effects. It is a “ story progression point”. It can be an action, a line of dialogue, a short scene, an action sequence, or dramatic sequence.
He also explained a Plot Point can be anything you want it to be. “any incident, episode or event that ‘hooks’ into the action and spins it around into another direction.” Syd Field was one of the first to emphasise the importance of the three-act structure in screenplay design. In this blog I want to look again at what plot points are and why they are important to story design. All these approaches use plot points in one way or another. In previous blogs I have discussed the three-act structure, sequences, and the mythic structure. The media are different but they are both about storytelling. If you are a writer, there’s a lot you can learn from the techniques used by scriptwriters in story design.
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