06Narrative Architecture
Built on Rick Altman's theory of following. Interpretive: read by a model.
Does my story stay focused, or does the narration wander away from the people the audience is following?
Tracks whom the story stays with and where it hands attention on, with the motifs and echoes that carry the theme.
€14 is the price for a feature-length script, up to 120 pages. A 60-page short costs €9. Most reports are ready in a few minutes. No account, and your script is deleted as soon as the analysis has run.
- Best for
- Writers wrestling with structure: unclear act breaks, subplots that leak attention, motifs that never pay off.
- Not designed for
- Enforcing a formula. Multi-focus and diffuse structures are legitimate designs; the instrument describes your attention pattern so you can confirm it is the one you intended.
What you get
- A following map: whom the story stays with, stretch by stretch
- Every change of focus and how it is made, with the scenes that leave the protagonist behind
- The act structure and turning points, beat by beat
- Motifs, oppositions and scenes that rhyme, traced across the script
- Sc. 87
The Morse code/blinking lights reveal (scene 87) changes every earlier appearance of the motion-sensor lights. What looked like technology was human labour all along: the parasite performing for the host.
For the next draft
- Da-Song's Morse-code decoding (scene 108) pays off a Scout detail planted only shortly before, so the audience is handed the connection instead of making it. Could the Scout detail sit in one of Da-Song's earlier scenes?
What it measures
How the story hands the audience’s attention from character to character (Altman’s following), where the structural beats fall, and the patterns that carry the theme: motifs, oppositions and echoes.
Method
- 1.The narration is tracked scene by scene to see which character it stays with, and the pattern is named: single, dual, multiple or diffuse focus.
- 2.Each change of focus is typed as a spatial hand-off, a thematic cut or an abrupt jump, and scenes that leave the protagonist are flagged.
- 3.Turning points, act breaks and pacing are located.
- 4.Recurring motifs, opposed values and scenes that echo each other are traced through the script.
Price by script length
Every price includes VAT. You choose the length when you upload.
Terms used in the report
- Following
- Altman’s reframing of narrative as the management of audience attention: which character the narration stays with, moment to moment.
- Following unit
- A continuous stretch of scenes that stays with one character (or a group travelling together).
- Change of focus
- A hand-over from one following unit to the next, which Altman calls a modulation. Metonymic: a spatial hand-off. Metaphoric: a thematic cut. Hyperbolic: an abrupt jump.
- Leakage
- A scene shown without the protagonist in a single-focus script. It often gives the audience knowledge the hero lacks.
- Motif
- A charged image, object, sound, or phrase that recurs and accumulates meaning. A motif that appears once is an orphan.
- Opposition
- A pair of opposed values (freedom and constraint, say) that structures a story’s meaning (Lévi-Strauss).
- Echo
- A rhyme between scenes: a setup paid off later, a mirror (the same situation transformed), or an inversion (the meaning reversed).
Run this on your draft
Narrative Architecture on a feature-length script, up to 120 pages. Shorter scripts cost less.
Feature-length price: €14
Analyse my scriptFurther reading
The references show where the instrument comes from. They don't validate individual readings; the methodology page covers what is measured, what is inferred and the known limits.