For this exercise I watched ‘The Third Man’ produced and directed by Carol Reed.
The movie is a classic and the story and characters well known.
Trying to identify the three act narrative structure was not easy. It seemed to me that the progress through Act 1 was very quick and the vast majority of the film was in Act 2, with a fairly shot finale in Act 3.
The diagram of the narrative structure is below:
When trying to develop the narrative structure, I was undecided about whether to add Harry Lime as a character in the diagram as his on screen presence happens fairly late in the film. The problem was that his presence is felt in the film from the very beginning when Holly arrives at the railway station even though he is not screen. The entire movies revolves around him even when he is not there. In the end, I decided to exclude him as a character line because he felt more like an all pervading theme throughout the film.
I also tried to identify the climax of the movie and came to the conclusion that there are two; the first is when Holly sees Harry for the first time, hiding in the shadows of his apartment entrance and the second is when Holly definitively agrees to help the police catch Harry, after seeing the sick children in hospital and realizing that this was Harry’s doing.
Other blogs:
I had a look at Helen Rosemier’s narrative structure for the film Crazy, Stupid, Love. It was fascinating to see that she had focused on mapping the emotional highs and lows of the story as opposed to a focus on individual characters.
http://helendigitalfilm.blogspot.de/2015/07/traditional-narratives.html
The second blog I had a look at was Richard Down where he broke down The Black Narcissus. The representation of the structure is very detailed and it is possible to follow all the character arcs through all the acts. What is interesting is that he used coloured arrows to show the flow of the narrative and it was easy to see both the complex and simple structures and how they interacted with each.
http://rjdown-dfp-log.blogspot.de/2013/02/project-15-narratives.html
Richard did make the comment that he thought is diagram was too complex and tried for a simpler format, however I think his original was so rich in detail and enable the person looking at it to see the complexity of the narrative.