Syd Field Research Articles

Effects and Implications of Self-discovery Writing for Creative Activities of College Students: Focusing on Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Subjects

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of self-discovery writing on broadcasting, video, and media majors through creative activities, and to derive educational implications accordingly. The self-reflection writing presented in the <Visual Storytelling> class went through a total of three stages based on the structural format of the three acts of video studied by Syd Field in the United States. As a result of analyzing the types of the virtual character settings that appeared in the creative output of a total of 34 learners, I was able summarize them into three types: 1) a type that reflects two or more 2) a type that shows human duality 3) a type that projects oneself as another being. As a result, Ifound that self-discovery writing plays a very important role in the development of learners' creativity along with self-reflection. In addition, this study confirmed the idea that a work which begins with ‘I’ is directly connected to rich material and that ‘self-discovery’ is highly likely to expand into voluntary learning through the integrated development of the concepts covered in the class. The educational implications of this include the re-examination of educational content through learner understanding, the development of convergence education in connection with major subjects, and the introduction of writing as a qualitative means for sincere learning. Currently, AI learning-based writing research is being actively conducted, but ‘self’ learning is as of yet an exclusively human domain, and self-discovery learning through self-exploration needs to be used in various subjects.

CIRI DAN FUNGSI LAGU DALAM MEMBENTUK STRUKTUR PLOT FILEM MUZIKAL MAGIKA (2010)

The musical film genre is the sole film genre predominantly guided by the songs sung by the characters to understand the narrative plot. Each of the songs has its own function to develop the narrative plot so that the audience can easily understand the underlying message. The songs produced require a high level of creativity by the director and composer, who would need to research and detail each song composition on the appropriate plot queue. Therefore, the researcher has selected 2 songs from the musical film Magika (2010) as case study analysis to examine and understand how the characteristics and functions of songs in shaping the plot structure are produced. The film ‘Magika’ was selected based on its achievements of being the only musical film to have won the “Best Film” and “Best Original Music” award at the 23rd Malaysian Film Festival. The research method was conducted through staged interviews by interviewing several film directors and composers, notes, and observations of Magika’s (2010) film work. Subsequently, the study was analysed using the ‘Conceptual Integration Networks’ theory in studying lyrical meaning then focusing on beat elements in plot structure introduced by Syd Field (2005) and Blake Snyder (2005) to both selected songs. As a result of this study, the researcher found that the specially created song in the musical film Magika (2010) is a communication bridge between the characters who sing the songs which is built through the song elements and plot structure.

Eksperyment somatyczno-dramaturgiczny. Haptyczna wizualność i deziluzyjna dramaturgia w filmie Czarny Łabędź Darrena Aronofsky’ego

Based on the example of Darren Aronofsky’s film Black Swan, the article explores the disillusive potential of interfering with the classic model of film dramaturgy. Referring to the traditional paradigm developed by Syd Field, the author indicates deviations from the conventional narrative that occur in Aronofsky’s film. The text seeks to confirm the thesis that contemporary cinematography exemplifies the trend of abandoning the attempts to create a seemingly referential world. By questioning the fundamental structure of the film’s dramaturgy, Black Swan provides additional interpretive possibilities. However, displaying the constituent elements of a work, for example, by transaccentuating their meaning or changing their place or length of occurrence, is not the most obvious disillusionment strategy. It may in fact remain hidden until the moment of careful analysis.

Eldar Ryazanov’s Film Watch Out For the Automobile Through the Prism of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero-Adventure”

We propose a universal methodology for analyzing scripted films based on the “hero’s journey” structure defined by Joseph Campbell. This methodology helps in identifying new meanings in a dramatic work, regardless of the genre of the film. Eldar Ryazanov’s tragicomedy Watch Out For the Automobile (also known as Uncommon Thief in the United States) is a classic example of Campbell’s monomyph. According to Campbell, the hero’s journey consists of three acts: “departure,” “initiation,” and “return.” Each act consists of six stages, if we amend the “departure” act to include the “ordinary world” stage, described by Christopher Vogler in The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers. There exists a correspondence between the stages of the hero’s journey and the compositional structure of drama, which has been pointed out by a number of researchers (mainly American authors like Syd Field, Linda Seger, Christopher Vogler, etc.) We, however, will attempt to prove that comedy films can also be analyzed from the standpoint of Campbell’s “hero-adventure”. Eldar Ryazanov’s film Watch Out For the Automobile (1966) is centered around the character of Yuri Detochkin. The climax of every episode of the film is focused on Detochkin, just as the climax of every stage of the hero’s journey is associated with the hero of the myth. However, this is not the primary similarity. The character of Detochkin, portrayed by Innokenty Smoktunovsky, having passed through a series of trials, acquires integrity and becomes transformed. As in a monomyth, we are dealing with the character arc of a hero who has completed his journey, and has thus fulfilled his mission. In the spirit of “hero-adventure”, Campbell’s allegories help interpret a variety of dramatic situations. This is because, in essence, all of these situations are archetypes. It is very important, however, to define their placement in the structure of the story. Most often this happens spontaneously, by way of the artist’s intuition, but the structure proposed by Campbell helps approach the creative process more deliberately. The goal of this research was to demonstrate the congeniality of the two methods: the intuitive method used by the authors of the film Watch Out For the Automobile, and the rational method used by the author of the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces based on a vast collection of legends and myths. Our hypothesis was entirely confirmed: Eldar Ryazanov and Emil Braginsky were using the same artistic logic for guidance as their predecessor Joseph Campbell.

Analysing the advantages of Aristotle’s two-act structure in comparison with Syd Field’s three-act structure in short comedic animation scriptwriting

Abstract This article investigates Aristotle’s two-act structure as an alternative for short comedic animation scriptwriting, and examines its advantages in comparison with Syd Field’s three-act structure. In this study, I am more interested in independent short form animation that finds comedy in dramatic situations, rather than being directly constructed as a series of gags. In certain cases, the three-act structure has been attributed to Aristotle. However, as Tierno implies, Aristotle merely suggests a two-act structure in his Poetics, consisting of complication and denouement, which has similarities to and even overlaps with Syd Field’s three-act structure (set-up, confrontation, resolution), so that they have been assumed to be identical by mistake. Meanwhile, there are subtle differences between the two structures, which will be separately discussed in this article. The three-act structure is widely used in Hollywood live-action and animation features. It is also applicable in short scripts but it sometimes appears to encumber, especially in very short animations. A short animation scenarist, who tries to be as minimal as possible, may not want to sacrifice the clarity of the story for the sake of this brevity. By applying an adaptive approach with an analytical-descriptive method, the present article shows how, in Aristotle’s two-act structure, it is possible to create a structured story in the shortest possible form by omitting the ‘set-up’ section and stepping into the heart of the story. The findings of the study reveal that the two-act structure could be a suitable alternative for comedic plots in which stereotypical characters appear as protagonists and the audience is not expected to spend much time building deep identification with them.

The three-act structure: Myth or magical formula?

Abstract Since Syd Field published his book Screenplay in 1979, the three-act structure has become a dominant tool for analysing screenplays and films. While the formulaic nature and constricting effects of this ‘paradigm’ have often been criticized by adherents of independent films, until now its explanatory suitability to classical and mainstream filmmaking has rarely been questioned as such. After commenting on the history of the concept, the article examines how well the model works in practice by statistically evaluating a large number of studies by different authors. This comparison reveals that there is a surprisingly low consensus on how to divide films into three acts. The discrepancies seem fundamentally due to the imprecision and vagueness of the paradigm’s core ideas, and thus neither the functions ascribed to acts nor the concept of plot points appear to be valid tools for ensuring consistency in analysis. Hence mainstream film needs to be seen as more complex – and structural analysis more a matter of interpretation – than the model allows for.

Conquer or Connect: Power, Patterns, and the Gendered Narrative

years ago i was se ated in a darkened theater trying to watch a film. All The Pretty Horses (2000) was pretty enough, with good production values and appealing music by Marty Stuart. But not only did the narrative fail to engage me, the structure and content of the screenplay positively pushed me away and al- lowed enough space for my mind to analyze or intellectualize the distance I felt. About halfway into the film, it occurred to me that by examin- ing the interplay between the main character (played by Matt Damon) and his love interest (played by Penelope Cruz), I had come to a more concrete language for explaining some- thing arising from screenplays that bothers me in many finished films. Not only is Damon's character launched on the commonly depicted hero's journey or quest, but his story also is really one of multiple conquests-break the horses, get the girl, beat the (admittedly unfair) system. His success in every case is temporary and contrasts vividly with the decisions made by the beautiful, rich woman who sleeps with him and says she loves him but ultimately chooses to maintain the connection she has with her powerful and close-knit Mexican family rather than strike out on her own with a penni- less drifter from north of the border. Within the context of the film, her choice is presented as somehow wrong, but a larger question remains: why should a choice to connect rather than to conquer be presented as wrong? I realized while sitting in the theater that the stories of my own life, not to mention the stories I re- spond to onscreen, are the underrepresented and underexplored narratives of connection, stories I believe are feminine in form.It is important to look critically at the impli- cations of various theories of narrative as well as the ideologies contained in the classical narrative structure rearticulated by popular screenwriting gurus such as Syd Field, Linda Seger, Richard Walter, Robert McKee, and Blake Snyder.1 By contrasting themes of conquest and connection in film, this article explores the im- plications of gender and narrative that are first expressed in screenplay. Simply put, stories told in a conventional, masculine form are gen- erally linear, hero-driven tales about conquest, whereas stories told with a more circular and sometimes collective feminine structure are often about overcoming obstacles in order to find connection. That connection may be inter- nal, may involve other individuals or groups, or may even relate to larger communities. I do not mean this in an essentialist or reductive sense; men might tell some stories with a feminine structure, and women working in commercial Hollywood most often tell conventionally mas- culine stories. I contend that there are other ways-good and useful ways that transcend the dominant neo-Aristotelian-to approach the screen narrative, and the structures I suggest reflect the lived experience of women. Exam- ples of how a feminine narrative structure looks in include such films as Strangers in Good Company (1990), Daughters of the Dust (1991), Blue (1993), The Piano (1993), Anto- nia's Line (1995), and more recently, I Am Love (2009). My starting place in exploring gender and narrative is an early essay by feminist liter- ary theorist Josephine Donovan called Toward a Women's Poetics.2 In this essay, Donovan argues that [t]o understand women's art one must have a knowledge of women's experi- ence and practice (99), and she delineates six structural conditions that she argues have traditionally shaped women's experience. I fol- low those categories of experience in the body of this article and tease out implications of the relevant patterns and power relationships as they apply to gendered narrative in the screen- play form. Once again, I want to make clear that I am talking about broad patterns and am not implying that Donovan's conditions represent the experience of all women or that feminine narrative structures are not available to men who find them meaningful. …

The plot point, the darkest moment, and the answered question: three ways of modelling the three-quarter-point

Many contemporary screenplay manuals, following Syd Field, encourage writers to place an act break approximately three-quarters of the way through the story. Although this would appear to be an area of widespread agreement, this essay argues that the manuals do not always define the 3/4-point in the same way. One common approach is to define the 3/4-point as a causally significant plot point; another approach is to regard it as an extreme point on an emotional curve, typically the darkest moment; and a third approach is to conceive of the 3/4-point as the answer to a previously introduced question. Taking a closer look at these three competing models of the 3/4-point can help us uncover the manuals' competing assumptions about narrative structure, showing how they conceptualize causality, emotion and comprehension.

A Study on the three-act structure of Linda Seger and Syd Field

A Study on the three-act structure of Linda Seger and Syd Field

Analysis of the Dramatic Structure of Korean Movies and Proposal for New Supporting Points Based on the Syd Field Paradigm

Analysis of the Dramatic Structure of Korean Movies and Proposal for New Supporting Points Based on the Syd Field Paradigm

‘The Technique of the Talkie’: Screenwriting Manuals and the Coming of Sound to British Cinema

The coming of sound at the end of the 1920s created opportunities for the profession and practice of screenwriting in Britain. Sound highlighted the importance of having a fully formed screenplay before beginning production. Writing dialogue elevated the screenwriter’s status to more on a par with their ‘legitimate’ cousins of the stage and page. However, the integration of this new technology presented difficulties to all aspects of film production, not least at the script stage. The initial use of sound presented a step into the unknown: the codes and norms of the ‘talkie’ were formed through a painful process of trial and error. In Britain, one mechanism which aided screenwriting’s transition to sound was the publication of number of screenwriting manuals during the 1930s. These manuals contained the technical advice on the craft of screenwriting which is usual in such books. In addition, they offer an insight into the struggle occurring in British screenwriting to define how the industry would address the political, technical and storytelling implications of sound. Screenwriting manuals have always represented a difficult resource for critics. Encompassing neither high aesthetic theory, nor a necessarily accurate representation of professional practice, they have fallen between methodological stools. Added to the bombast and naked commercialism of current ‘gurus’ such as Robert McKee or Syd Field,1 it is little wonder that, until recently, they have been used to address either current craft practices or as a secondary source within the context of other works.2 When manuals have been used, there has been a tendency towards a macro view, which has inevitably focused on

Developing the Screenplay Wingwalking: An Analysis of the Writing and Rewriting Process

This article explores and analyses the various stages in the screenwriting process, using as a case study a feature length screenplay I have developed over the last few years titled Wingwalking. Rather than examining the process from a ‘how to write point of view’, I will ask how and why certain decisions are made and what effect they have, while trying to understand the process of screenwriting as separate to and yet part of the production of a film. Studying the development of the screenplay and the intentions behind each draft will, I hope, provide useful insights into the screenplay writing and rewriting process. By drawing on my own screenplay as a case study, the article will analyse the process of developing a script from its conception through various drafts, and reflect on some of the differences in development between a screenplay written in the US and the UK. The study of the screenplay is a relatively new area of academic scrutiny and there is little established writing in this field, a lack which it is hoped will be redressed. Lina Khatib, in an editorial in a recent edition of the Journal of Media Practice, observes academic writing on the screenplay is ‘under-researched’ (2007: 106). There are, though, many books in the ‘how to write a screenplay’ vein and those written by the ‘screenwriting gurus’ such as Syd Field and Robert McKee have had a direct impact on the screenplay development process in both the US and the UK, especially regarding how a screenplay or film is structured. Thompson explains:

Dorothy and the Boyz

The Wizard of Oz and Boyz N the ` Hood are the same story. The protagonists, Dorothy and Tre, are the same character. A critical examination of the literary and cultural similarities between The Wizard of Oz and Boyz N the ` Hood will prove their mirror reflections. Yet, racial bias clouds this reflection and influences what moviegoers pay to see, how they perceive what they see, and what they choose as their favorite films. The theories and writings of three of the foremost authorities on the screenplay and the art of dramatic writing, Lajos Egri, Syd Field, and Robert McKee, demonstrate the connections between The Wizard of Oz and Boyz N the ` Hood. Respectively, the young protagonists, Dorothy and Tre, are both facing death while trying to survive and escape their dangerous environments. Absent of racism, an audience should be able to see similarity in character and accept any good story, well told.

Fault seal prediction: the gouge ratio method

Abstract The reduction in pore throat size attributable to the enhanced clay content in the fault rock between two juxtaposed reservoir bodies is able to produce an effective seal to hydrocarbon migration. The gouge ratio, when applied to sand-shale sequences, indicates the proportion of phyllosilicate material that is expected to be incorporated into the fault rock, hence it provides a measure of the seal capacity. Gouge ratios for faulted reservoir sequences are computed from data that are routinely available from fields at the appraisal or production stage. We present a repeatable methodology that maximizes the use of seismically based geometric data and well-based stratigraphic and compositional data. The resulting gouge ratio calculations can be used comparatively at the scale of individual faults, fields or basins. We examine an example fault from the Oseberg Syd Field that is known to seal and we show that a threshold shale gouge ratio of 18% will support a cross-fault pressure difference of c. 8 bar.

Reviews

I hear America typing: A survey of scriptwriting manuals Richard A. Blum. Television Writing: From Concept to Contract. New York: Hastings House, 1980. viii + 184 pp. $8.95, paper. Robert Edmonds. Scriptwriting for the Audio–Visual Media. New York: Teachers College Press, 1978.185 pp. $10.95, paper. Syd Field. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. New York: Dell, 1979. xii + 212 pp. $4.95, paper. Rolando Giustini. The Filmscript: A Writer's Guide. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice‐Hall, 1980. xii + 243 pp. $6.95, paper. Robert Lee and Robert Misiorowski. Script Models: A Handbook for the Media Writer. New York: Hastings House, 1978.96 pp. $4.50, paper. Martin Maloney and Paul Max Rubenstein. Writing for the Media. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice‐Hall, 1980. x + 293 pp. $14.95, cloth. Constance Nash and Virginia Oakey. The Screenwriter's Handbook: What to Write, How to Write It, Where to Sell It. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1978. x + 149 pp. $3.95, paper. Wells Root. Writing the Script: A Practical Guide for Films and Television. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979. xvi + 210 pp. $5.95, paper. The avoidance of criticism Brian Henderson. A Critique of Film Theory. New York: E. P. Dut‐ton, 1980. 233 pp. $8.95. The self‐realized critic Beverle Houston and Marsha Kinder. Self and Cinema: A Trans‐formalist Perspective. Pleasantville, New York: Redgrave, 1980. 461 pp. $12.70. Lubitsch reconsidered Leland A. Poague. The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch. South Brunswick and New York: A. S. Barnes, 1978. Robert Carringer and Barry Sabath. Ernst Lubitsch: A Research and Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. The cinema must answer to Hungarians Georges Sadoul. Panorama du cinéma hongrois. Paris: Les Éditeurs francais réunis, 1952. 62 pp., illustrated. István Nemeskürty. Word and Image: History of the Hungarian Cinema. Budapest: Corvina Press, 1974. 252 pp., illustrated. Graham Petrie. History Must Answer to Man: The Contemporary Hungarian Cinema. Budapest: Corvina Press, 1978. 284 pp., illustrated. Yvette Biró. Miklós Jancsó. Preface by Andrzej Wajda. Paris: Editions Albatros, 1977. 142 pp., illustrated. The British factual film of the 1930s Rachel Low. History of the British Film 7929‐39; Documentary and Educational Films of the 1930s. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1979. 244 pp. Rachel Low. History of the British Film 1929–39: Films of Comment and Persuasion of the 1930s. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1979. 256 pp. Crime marches on Carlos Clarens. Crime Movies: An Illustrated History. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1980. 351 pp. $16.95. World War II films: Three books in review Roger Manvell. Films and the Second World War. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1974. 388 pp. Lawrence H. Suid. Guts & Glory: Great American War Movies. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison‐Wesley Publishing Company, 1978. 357 pp. Colin Shindler. Hollywood Goes to War: Films and American Society 1939–1952. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. 152 pp.

Quoting and Misquoting Aristotle's "Poetics" in Recent Screenwriting Bibliography

Between 2007 and 2012 more than 100 new books on screenwriting have been accessioned to the United States Library of Congress. The present work reviews 68 of these books and another 27 manuals on screenwriting published since 1979, the year of publication of The Foundations of Screenwriting, Syd Field’s seminal work on this discipline. This article seeks to explore the range of Aristotle’s influence on these manuals and to suggest that there should be a second reading of Poetics, that considers not only its didactic and technical dimension, but also that pertaining to philosophy and wisdom, and thus the professional interest for writers and viewers.