Here’s a wonderful insight I found recently that makes writing with Dramatica easier. You may find it useful or say I’m extraordinarily late to the party.
For years, I associated the signposts of the OS throughline only with the Protagonist’s arc. Some movies would periodically have short scenes with the Antagonist’s arc, and other characters sometimes had ongoing appearances. I thought of the Antagonist scenes as an illustration of the Forewarning.
Then I looked through the comprehensive storyforms in Dramatica.com… those ones which explain the story points in greater detail, telling how the OS Concern applies, for example, to both the protagonist and antagonist, et al.
So, a better way someone could outline the OS throughline could be writing out sequence illustrations for each of the four Driver archetypes: protag, antag, contagonist, and guardian. This would give each of them more motivation as real people, rather than seeming like guests in the protag’s arc. It also emphasizes the distinction in Dramatica between Drivers and Passengers.
This helps with my screenplay in that for quite a while my instinct was to develop a separate arc for my contagonist, but he wasn’t the villain. But how do I overlap all these characters? No. All four would have their own illustrations of the “drop down” thematics: Concern, Issue, Counterpoint, Problem, and Symptom.
I also happened to catch an insight into the epilogues of movies, at least in cop/detective genre (“Starsky and Hutch”, “Hot Pursuit”, “Armed and Dangerous”, “Dragnet”). The epilogue isn’t something tacked on after the final sequence, Signpost 4. It’s the climax, what I’ve seen as the third and final portion of Signpost 4 for each of the throughlines.