  Posts Tagged ‘Dan Harmon’  ‘Breaking Bad’ Mapped as Dan Harmon
Story Circle   Community creator Harmon writes using a story
circle, making sure that every script meets his eight steps of a
satisfying story. As you can see by the chart embedded above
(filled with spoilers), Breaking Bad contained all eight
elements and can help aspiring storytellers master the elegant
structure. Here’s more from Wired about Harmon’s method:  So he
watched a lot of Die Hard, boiled down a lot of Joseph Campbell,
and came up with the circle, an algorithm that distills a
narrative into eight steps … Harmon calls his circles
embryos—they contain all the elements needed for a satisfying
story—and he uses them to map out nearly every turn on
Community, from throwaway gags to entire seasons. If a plot
doesn’t follow these steps, the embryo is invalid, and he starts
over. To this day, Harmon still studies each film and TV show he
watches, searching for his algorithm underneath, checking to see
if the theory is airtight.  Mediabistro