The Nine-Act Structure by David Siegel
| The Nine-Act Structure plays with the attraction of hidden information. The audience of a Nine-Act Structure movie is confronted with a guessing game in the first three chunks of the movie. The mystery is resolved in the Reversal which occurs in chunk 8. By doing so, the audience's interest is maintained during the character-building scenes and the failures in chunks 4 to 6. Several assumptions are made that are necessary for this sort of direction to work. In chunk 6, the hero decides on a course of action that will not actually resolve the mystery. However, the course of action must be logical within the information available to the audience. A victim that walks into an dark cellar (with the villian's trap or decoy hidden in the shadows) must have a reason for investigating the cellar in the first place. Although audiences may know of the existence of the trap, or that the decoy is a decoy, the audience must believe that the victim can plausibly not know of the trap or the true nature of the decoy. The key in the final revelation of information in chunk 7 is that it must decisively resolve the mystery scene in chunk 3. The best shows induce an 'aha' moment among the attentive audience. Many shows do include a stunning reversal, but if it does not effective resolve the earlier mystery, the audience may be left with a sense of dissatisfaction. |