Music has scales / raagas. What about storytelling in movies and prestige shows?

The paragraph in the beginning reminded me of the 5-step story structure I was taught at school, and I just noticed that it is only featured on the French Wikipedia page [0]. In my experience it worked quite well for classical linear stories, and highlighting it in a text back at school also scored a lot of marks during exams, so now I am somewhat trained at recognizing it.

[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)

Very interesting premise in the title. Something like the seven basic plots of Western storytelling, but built from an Indian perspective?

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.

This is a very interesting concept. I see in your replies to other comments that you are looking at movies from different cultures, which would be a great test of your idea. Once you have sufficiently advanced, it would be great to look at theatre too. I have a hypothesis that movie-writing began to diverge from theatre-writing in the very late 20th century in terms of structure and writing with the rise of the blockbuster and the emphasis on spectacle, and we lost something after that.

so raagas are like scales? i thought it was just a type of music where the same songs are played by every artist, like blues, so maybe i don't get this idea at all. but is it about the order of scenes in movies? or like which scenes are "allowed" in a movie of a particular genre? in any case, are you familiar with the Aarne Thompson Uther index?

For individual notes there's https://tvtropes.org

This has been almost 2.5 years in the making.

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)