Contraband : One Month later
We launched CONTRABAND on July 12th. Exactly one month later, we have our first film lined up.
Topic
Arc (Product)
A collection of 22 issues
Where Does Narrative Structure Fit in the Business of Film?
Stephen Follows recently published one of the most clear-eyed pieces I have read about the economics of the film industry. In it, he analyses 49,834 films and forty years of academic research to answer a deceptively simple question: how do people actually make money in film?
How Musicians use Quanten Arc
It is always a pleasant surprise when a feature you built, finds a use by a different target audience and it somehow makes perfect sense.
Screenplay Analysis : Backrooms
Crisis Dominant siege, correct archetype match. Strong kitchen centrepiece. Three fixable issues: Act 3 sags, Clark's deterioration is off-page, Mary's threshold motivation is underwritten. Strong first draft.
Screenplay Analysis : Obsession
Bear wishes for love. It works. That's the problem. Obsession has sharp dialogue, a clean premise, and it works. The bones are right. The problem is one layer deeper.
The Black List 2025: A Narrative Archetype Analysis
Every December, the Black List gives the industry a snapshot of what development executives are responding to. 74 scripts. 86 writers. Nearly 500 executives voting.
What it does not tell you is what kind of stories they are responding to. Genre does some of that work. But genre is surface.
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.
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.