STORY BEATS — Movie plots beat by beat

As faithful GITS readers know, we began a collective project this year, as part of a our bi-weekly Script Reading and Analysis series, to generate Scene-By-Scene Breakdowns. And thanks to some outstanding and wonderful members of this humble screenwriting community, we now have 27 breakdowns for movies ranging from All Is Lost and American Hustle to The Social Network and Whiplash… with more to come!

Well, you can file this in the Great Minds Think Alike category. Got an email a few weeks back from David McClellan:

Hi there — love your GITS blog and your emails and content. As a big fan and reader of your content — (and a writer/filmmaker — last year Cleetus Redbone was featured in your Movies You Made series), I wanted to invite you to my website storybeats.net — which is simply my blog of all of my personal movie plot breakdowns that I post for FREE.

And what is a “story beat”? Here is David’s definition:

A Story Beat is the smallest portion of action within a story — a plot element. A character does something to achieve a result — that is a beat. String enough of them together and you get a story.

Check it out. David has 50 films broken down and he says he’s got “at least another hundred or so coming”. Here’s are links to David’s beat sheets for Jaws, The Exorcist, and The Shining. They are similar in spirit to our scene-by-scene breakdowns. Either way they serve a valuable function:

They help you to analyze the structure of a story. If you don’t think this is important, think again. Check out pro screenwriter Kiwi Smith (10 Things I Hate About You, Legally Blonde) as she talks about the value of breaking down movies.

If you are serious about learning the craft, you simply must analyze movies and scripts. A big part of that is working with scene-by-scene breakdowns and beat sheets.

And now with David’s site, we have two great — and free! — online resources.