Quanten Notes

Latest — 19 May 2026

The Grammar We Found

In the last post we asked whether narrative has a formal grammar the way music does. Whether there are discoverable parent structures underlying the thousands of story shapes we see across cinema. We have been working on that question for the past year. This post is what we found.

More notes

AI Filmmaking Is Not Cheap as you think.

I keep seeing the same tweet. Some variation of: one prompt, one movie, zero budget. The future of cinema is here. The studios are dead. I get it. The tools are genuinely remarkable. But I have been looking at some numbers this week and I want to share them with

Is there a musical-scale equivalent for story structure? Clustering screenplay arcs to find out.

If AI takes the cognitive work, humanity defaults to stories and the arena - and we don't have a grammar for compelling narrative yet.

Introducing Continuous Narrative Comparison : Seeing the whole story.

Sometimes, the story does not stop at the end of the film. Neither should the analysis. Quanten Arc now supports continuous arc comparison across franchise films, sequels and episodic series - seeing the whole story as one unbroken narrative.

Why Your Brain Cannot Evaluate a Script and What to Do About It

The Black List is one of the most respected communities for writers and filmmakers. It is a matter of prestige to join the 8+ Club there. Yet writers regularly report the same script scoring a 9 from one reader and a 4 from another. Not because one reader is wrong. Because we are fighting biology.

Why Quanten Arc Does Not Tell You What to Do

We believe better decisions come from better visibility, not better opinions. That belief drives everything we’re building. Here’s a way to understand us.

Scene Pacing and Runtime: What 271 Screenplays Actually Tell Us

Everyone says audiences have no attention span. But the same people watching reels are binge-watching prestige TV and listening to 4-hour podcasts. We analyzed the 271 films benchmarked on Quanten Arc. The findings are not what you expect.

Introducing Character Presence: A New Way to Read a Script

One of the questions I get asked most often when I show Quanten Arc to writers and development executives is some version of: "Can it tell me about the characters?" Now, it can.

Deconstructing Project Hail Mary: Were the Comps Right?

When Ryan Gosling was attached to Project Hail Mary, the development conversation around the film kept returning to the same reference points. Interstellar. The Martian. Arrival. Gravity. These were the comps being used to describe what the film was and who it was for. We have the structural data for

Deconstructing Project Hail Mary: What the Data Shows

Andy Weir published Project Hail Mary in May 2021. By 2022 Drew Goddard had a draft. When directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller first screened their assembly cut, it ran 3 hours and 45 minutes. They described it as embarrassing. They cut 135 minutes. The film that released in 2026