My musician friends who are scholars in indian music tell me that there is a difference between a written raaga and a performed raaga and in a performed raaga, the actor has the right to improvize on that.
Im trying very hard to not go into the rabbit hole which might become purely academic :) But i would think that if we take how youtube content is structured, or tiktoks are, each format would lend to a new structure.
Thats my sense, i could be wrong. What do you think?
There are 72 major raagas - called mela kartha raagas - those are the root raagas, and there are combinations and permutations done that generates the janya raagas - which is children raagas (there are thousands of those - and different artists can create variations on these).
Most films in Hollywood have narrative beats - its 7-8 beats. Each tv show for eg, has 5-6 beats. Most micro drama episode has 2-4 beats. Its quite structure that way.
If you take a structure like Save the cat, or Heroes' journey, the order of the beats are also quite well laid out - just that those two structures dont cover the span of stories, and rest is all quite undocumented.
Im trying to work backwards - and quite aware that i am probably identifying derivatives than the root, but even the derivatives can be quite useful to guide others from generating engaging content.
I am not aware of Aarne Thompson's work. I'm looking it up right now...
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)
http://arc.quanten.co/showcase/film (Anora) http://arc.quanten.co/showcase/series (The Pitt S01E01)
There was this snide remark that someone in hollywood made where they said, they make movies whereas Europe makes (art) cinema.
I havent figured out how to resolve that yet.
But yes to korean, japanese films - that's very much on the list.