With movies, you have a general 90-120 minute (or beyond) window to tell a single story from beginning to end. However, the television platform has many unique differences compared to cinematic storytelling.
Read More: 10 Screenplay Structures Screenwriters Can Useįor television, four-act and five-act structures (see below) - as well as many other variations - are just additions to the core three-act structure of any story. How you build on that basic structure creates many additional variations. The three-act structure in cinema is the most basic and pure structure that most films - no matter what gurus and pundits say - follow. This has been the story structure followed by mankind since the days of telling stories around the village fire or etching cave paintings on stone walls depicting worthy stories of hunting for prey (beginning), confronting the prey (middle), and defeating the prey (end).
The general story structure is fairly simple - Beginning, Middle, and End.
