Are there 4 movies (or even 2or3) that share a storyform that have complete analysis on the Dramatica analysis page? If so you could just grab the SP descriptions from Finding Nemo and Collateral and whatever else and see if reading through the MC of one with the IC of another and the OS and RS of another would make any sense.
How would this work? In any example you come up with (like Collateral and Nemo, or Blade Runner 2059 and Aliens), you would have to illustrate each beat, figure out which throughline they were in, and then fit them together. I don’t know if there are any examples that are fully illustrated.
But isn’t part of the meaning the connection between the different throughlines? Or is it enough to hold them up next to each other?
In @didomachiatto’s thread we were talking about Signpost order – it’s importance, but how Dramatica lets you mix up the order in which you reveal things as long as the chronology is consistent. But how does that work if all of your throughlines are completely separate? e.g. if your entire MC tale takes place in 1932 and your OS is in 2140, haven’t you put all four MC Signposts before your OS signposts?
Regarding your house analogy – I would argue that a house like that would lack coherence, and therefore “meaning” in the sense that we mean it here. We can all come up with plenty of broken stories that we would still be able to recognize as “a movie”.
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Yeah, I suppose you’d have to write out each beat. Or edit the movies together or something. I was just suggesting it as an alternative to writing a completely new story as a test of the idea.
The storyform is already four separate throughlines. The connection is that they have elements in common, not characters. The Mc crucial element, for instance, is still an MC element. The OS perspective also looks at that element, but from a completely different perspective-even when it’s the same player doing it within the OS. So I’d say types of connections, then, are all still there in the storyform, not the telling.
The meaning, though, I’d think would come from “holding them up next to each other”, or seeing simultaneously how all four perspectives view the problem.
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As a story provides meaning, a house provides shelter, even with poor decorating. For a house to be broken in the same way, I’d think it’d be more like one room is a living room while another room is a bridge, or a park or something. That seems much less meaningful as a house. But it wasn’t meant to be a perfect analogy…and also i should’ve offered three more analogies woven into it 
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I jumped on it because it’s actually an interest of mine! Are you familiar with the work of Christopher Alexander? I’ve often thought that Dramatica is a kind of analogous to what Alexander has tried to do with the Pattern Language for architecture, design and the built environment. Long story short, according to Alexander, the world is full of broken structure (as it is with broken stories). But that’s a discussion for another time…
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I agree. The connection has meaning.
@Greg for your house analogy, you still need interior hallways to connect the differently-decorated sections. If there’s no way to get from one section to another without going outside, it’s not really a house.
As an example, I don’t think Star Wars would have communicated its meaning nearly as well if, all else being equal, someone other than Luke had shot down the Death Star. Even if Luke demonstrated the same change and say, trusted the Force enough to escape the battle instead of being killed – if he didn’t significantly impact the resolution of the OS, something would be missing.
I’m not saying he necessarily had to be the one to shoot down the Death Star, just that his personal struggle had to impact the outcome of the OS in some way. e.g. maybe he gets killed, but through trusting the Force he goes down so spectacularly that it inspires the other rebel pilots to bring down the Death Star. (Or maybe they don’t bring down the Death Star, but they fight back hard enough to save Yavin and show the Empire that they can’t be cowed – that’d work too, since this is a Doing Goal not Obtaining.)
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I am not, but now i’m curious. I’ll have to check it out.
But imagine a story where all the Luke as a jedi/rebel stuff is the same, but instead of all the ‘hey, I can shoot womp rats that size no problem’ stuff, you instead have a different set of scenes where you see, I dunno, a kid trying out for the local sportsball team, but finds he’s not as good as the other kids. But he just makes the team, and one of the last scenes is the star sportsballer getting hurt and it’s all up to this kid and he starts going over all the techniques and book learnin he’s spent four acts working on, and then realizes that none of that stuff can help him now, so he pushes out of his head and just trusts himself to sportsball the heck out of it and makes the point that wins the game. And that scene comes just before Luke turns off his computer and blows up the Death Star. You’ve just replaced whiny farm boy with eager sportsballer. Is that movie as good as Star Wars? I have no idea. But seeing those scenes juxtaposed still gives you the same message about personally trusting yourself and they trusting themselves, doesn’t it? You’d still get the message that if you stop trying to validate yourself it would lead to a success for everybody, wouldn’t you?
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also, we seem to be moving away from the topic of the thread. Feel free to reign us back in @HaroldLloyd
I don’t think I would get the same message, no. What you described does not seem complete – it feels like it’s missing something*, similar to when a story is missing a throughline. However, I honestly can’t say for sure until I experience a real story like that – maybe my mind would fill in the gaps automatically. (So @Hunter hurry up! 
)
* I feel like you could fix it with some connective tissue, even some object like the red violin in The Red Violin. Does that make sense? So in your example it might be just, the sportsballer’s brother is one of the rebel pilots, and just as they’re descending on the Death Star he gets the message that his brother won the Corellian Cup.
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For some reason, Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life,” pops into my head.
The connections and overlaps (dual appreciations too) of the througlines buttress theme, but do they create it?
I’m reminded of Eisenstein’s theory of montage. Two images, by proximity, create a third meaning.
However, I feel like folks prefer to keep the througlines completely separate. And, if you do this, you don’t need to be common characters, stories, etc.
But maybe, that’s an attempt to simplify something holistic into linear terms? I mean, story is an analogy. An imperfect reproduction of reality is used as a medium to express this analogy. Correct?
Reducing life to a series of problems is a very linear way of viewing the world. Isn’t it?
On a side note, wouldn’t a story where the througlines were independent of each other (in terms of storytelling) be longer than a typical story with overlap.
There wouldn’t be any chance for dual appreciations, no efficiency in storytelling.
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My initial reaction to this is that it wouldn’t work at all. These people are trying to stop the Empire by blowing up a device that is vaporizing planets, why would we care about some eager sportsballer?
Yes, but I can get that message from what you just wrote. The question is, how well is that message argued? How emotionally resonant is it?
Yeah, that’s kind of how I’m seeing it now.
I do think it’s a super-interesting experiment though. And I agree with @mlucas that it might work with just a small amount of connective tissue. In fact, that could be even more moving and affecting if done right. (@mlucas I am still thinking I want to re-watch Kieslowski’s Red and find a storyform for it…I feel like that might be a relevant example but it’s been so long since I’ve seen it that I’m not sure.)
I guess I want to add: I think that Dramatica is saying the exact same thing four different times in different ways contained in different contexts.
In other words, it is repeating itself.
That’s why I agree, according to the theory, you can do what is proposed. Kind of.
However, the problem is… none of the througlines exist in a vacuum.
So, you are either going to have four complete story forms that are exactly the same (a very long and repetitive work) or you are going to have one normal length story that has been frankensteined (by act I guess) together.
I’m not sure there’s another way to break it up into four parts.
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Isn’t Dramatica biased towards linear thinking?
because he’s giving us a first person perspective on the same problem that the rebels are giving us a they perspective of, that Obi-Wan is giving us a You perspective of, and that Luke and Obi-Wan’s mentorship is giving us a We perspective of. We see the effect of Test with a plucky kid just trying to play sports, we see the effects of Test on a group of plucky rebels trying to fight a war.
How well does it follow the storyform?
Audience reception is really besides the point, here, i think. All we’re talking about is whether it’s theoretically sound-and I see no reason it wouldn’t be and Jim has as much as confirmed. But I also think with the right stories you’d actually have the opportunity to create something MORE emotionally resonant than when just using straight storytelling across the board.
When I watch a movie that uses the same storytelling throughout, I never think about how, say, the relationship problem reflects in the overall story problem unless i’m specifically thinking about dramatica. But by separating the story telling in different throughlines, it could actually cause the audience to put more effort into considering the similarities and differences (the point of having different perspectives in the first place) between the married couple dealing with a rocky marriage and racers dealing with a rocky terrain, or whatever the story is about.
How good the story is is all up to the author and the audience reception. The emotional view of the story and whether its good or not or how well the audience received the message just is different from the logistics of whether the storyform is being expressed. As long as the storyform is expressed, theory says the storymind will follow it, even with different storytelling.
right, they exist in a Storymind. They exist in context. A human mind can detect the context of a plucky kid playing sports and how it relates to plucky rebels fighting a war.
No, you’re going to have one storyform that is expressed through what will appear to be four separate tales that, when viewed together, add up to something greater than the sum of their parts because those four separate tales actually quadrangulate the inequity that each of them is dealing with individually-just like the four throughlines in any other Grand Argument Story.
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And, therefore, you have the short story anthology with a connected theme.
I’m not disagreeing that you can do this. But, what you are talking about is more comparative to a trilogy of movies, finding a complete story form over a series of books, etc. That’s old hat.
But, I guess that I’m thinking more avante-guard… switching stories midstream.
It kind of reminds me of en media res used in different extremes.
Whoa!! We must be on the same wavelength because I almost brought up Red and the way she turns her head just so at the end as a possible example of “connective tissue”. (Though like you I’d have to watch it again to see, it might just be part of a “regular” complete story.)
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In a way, except this wouldn’t just be four separate stories with similar themes. It would be four separate stories that are specifically intertwined in 4 dimensions not to further explore a connected theme, but to build a larger context of theme between them.
I don’t think it is. I’m not following here at all
What I’m saying is that this is theoretically sound, yes. Switch to a new story every sign post if you want! The audience may not follow along with sixteen different stories, but as long as those sixteen bits of story follow the storyform, the Storymind they exist within will follow along too!
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This is the easy way to do it, and no doubt, in this style it has been done. However, from what I have gathered from the short story anthologies built in this way that I have read, they’re not so much about viewing the same inequity in different perspectives so much as they are about viewing the same inequity in different contexts. (Close, extremely close, but not quite the same.)
That said, I’d be wholly surprised if there hasn’t been a short story anthology where each story looks at the inequity with separate perspectives. (That is, I’m certain it’s been done, and I just haven’t seen it.)
This is more to the point of the experiment that I’m working on. The question, though, is less about trying to get the audience reception right, and more about seeing if there is enough there to make it worth trying to get the audience reception right. All without having to connect, in some linear fashion, the four different Tales.
Many current movies that want to do this usually have something that is shared among each tale. Perhaps a jacket that walks through the scenes, or characters that are related through bloodline or knowing each other. I’ve seen it done with journal entries, too. The question: Can it be done without this?
Oh, and for those wondering about my experimental story, I have the MC and OS Throughlines fleshed out with the Problem(s). I’ll be working on IC later this week, and hopefully I’ll have enough time to get to the RS.
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