Entry: Save The Cat

[enkiv2]

This is going to be a cheating pseudo-entry since I worked on it months ago, but, I do plan to work on it over the course of November since it might produce interesting results.

There's a popular manual for screenwriters called Save The Cat. (I think I mentioned this in resources last year, or possibly the previous.) It describes a fairly specific format for producing screenplays with a conventional 3-act structure and conventional set-ups and pay-offs, which is interesting for aspiring screenwriters since it gives plenty of structure (such that while a screenplay written by its rules may be mediocre and uninteresting, such a screenplay will never reach the heights of comical incompetence common in even low-budget professional films from 30 years ago). It's interesting from a generative fiction perspective because it promises a conventionally structured screenplay with primary and secondary character arcs out of a collection of 3-page chunks.

My implementation is here: https://github.com/enkiv2/savethecat

At the time of this writing, I have generation for settings & characters (based on the archetypes/ section of Corpora), a mechanism for producing dialog from templates (filling in scene introductions, character names, etc.), and an arrangement of these scenes based on the beat sheet (in other words, for each scene, we have the emotional change for the primary character, the conflicting characters or forces in the scene, the type of conflict as archetype, and some logic for ensuring that for "special" spots on the grid we have one of the appropriate conflict types).

What I don't have is: full 3-page templates, a nuanced templating engine, mechanisms to insert items that are supposed to appear in dialog at particular places (the statement of the theme on page 12, the six things that need to change between 1 and 10, the demonstrations that these things have changed in the third act), and mechanisms to ensure thematic consistency & continuity between scenes.

Just by adding a ton of 3-page templates, I could produce something that's clearly a screenplay (though repetitive and incoherent). I'll see whether or not that's feasible in November, but a better templating engine (maybe something with named rules & support for persistent names like GGC) will help.

[greg-kennedy]

I like the idea of dredging up template patterns from various books, putting them into a program, and then running them a thousand times to see what comes out. D&D 2nd Edition for example used to have a "random dungeon generator" based on rolling dice... putting that into a script could make you a towering castle really quickly!

Looking forward to see how this one turns out.

[enkiv2]

I'm actually doing that for #12 in an imitation of something @tra38 was
doing. I have a large set of screenplays so perhaps I'll mine them for
usable template components (though they are web-scraped so I'll have to
clean them up quite a bit).

On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 10:17 AM Greg Kennedy [email protected]
wrote:

I like the idea of dredging up template patterns from various books,
putting them into a program, and then running them a thousand times to see
what comes out. D&D 2nd Edition for example used to have a "random dungeon
generator" based on rolling dice... putting that into a script could make
you a towering castle really quickly!

Looking forward to see how this one turns out.

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