How to use StoryFit AI to analyze your movie plot

Each StoryFit Content Insights Report delivers specific insights to the most important elements of the story: Major Characters, Major Themes, Action. Dialogue, Emotion and Tone, Locations and Plot features.  In this series we’ll give some examples of real movie scripts that StoryFit’s Artificial Intelligence ingested and what it reveals.

StoryFit Content Insights: Plot

Structure & Style

One you’ve reviewed what the StoryFit Content Insights Overview shows, and analyzed the various personalities and emotions of your characters, it’s time to get to the heart of your story. Here we’ll dive into all of the things you can learn about your script lot from the Structure and Style section of the report.

Studios and movie professionals use this segment for budgeting, shoot planning, budget-based green-lighting, resource allocation, development, and marketing.

Example Questions Answered:

• How many different settings are there?
• Is there enough emotional variation, or is the audience going to get tired?
• On average, whats’ the balance between action and dialogue? Do we need to amp up conflict?
• Is it a travel narrative? Do they circle back home? Is it all in one main setting?

The structure is divided into three sections for analysis: the overall structure,  a story-arc visualization with sentiment analysis, and a scene-by-scene map of dialogue vs. action.

Overall structure

StoryFit AI analyzes the script and breaks it down by scene to look at three major components:

Dialogue – both the rate of dialogue per scene and the number of scenes without dialogue.

Action — both as an average per scene and in comparison with the dialogue.

Setting — inside vs. outside, day vs. night, and specific locations.

Plot Features

Summary of plot features and sentimentality

Here is where you can *literally* see your story take shape! This visualization of the script with sentiment analysis is a great tool for super-powered comps, to compare one script to another (or a set of scripts), identify lags in pacing or scenes to look at for promotional purposed, etc.

How to read this graph

The x-axis follows the script timeline as it is written, scene by scene.

The baseline is a 0–emotionally neutral–and the higher the lines rises, the greater the positive/happy excitement and emotional intensity. The lower it falls, the darker or more subdued the scene is. The 0 value is between the third and fourth lines, it the middle of the graph area.

Archetypes?

For the standard report, we show you the script in comparison to its closest of six basic archetypes. In addition to being a fun way to see the way this script compares with a classic story’s shape, this comparison is to illustrate how granularly we can compare different scripts or stories. 

This comparison can be used to compare the text to a myriad of other points of data: your other productions, your competitor’s production, a competing or previous property, etc.  

Use Cases:

• Side-by-side plot comparison
• What does this movie look like?
• Identify emotionally intense moments for trailer editing
• Overall shape of the movie (coming of age a la Boyhood, e.g.)
• Pacing of the overall movie
• Reference point when developing marketing language. For example, if the sentiment shifts suddenly, a story with very rapid inclines or abrupt declines are likely to come across as exciting or scripts with plot twists. One with many highs and lows could be described as an “emotional roller coaster,” while one with relatively stable sentiment may be a more introspective story.

What about the other possibilities? Here are all of the archetypes we use in the standard report, complete with basic description and example films.

Dialog & Action Per Scene

How much action is there in each scene? How much dialogue? Are there places that could use less/more of either? StoryFit’s structure and style section gives you a scene-by-scene account of action and dialogue throughout the entire script: