PLOT DRIVEN OR CHARACTER DRIVEN

Plot driven stories follow changes in the external world, while character driven stories follow changes within an individual.  Plot driven stories usually feature closed endings, with complete resolutions.  Character driven stories usually feature open endings, with partial resolutions.  Perhaps because film is a visual art, most films are plot driven, and even character driven stories are more precisely plotted in film than in literature.   In film, basic story design means plot design.

PARTICULAR AND UNIVERSAL

Good stories operate on two levels.  They provide particular characters, locations and scenes, which are often appealing in their texture and novelty, and they provide universal characters and situations, which by their familiarity seem to reach deep inside us.   Character driven stories tend to emphasize the particular, while plot driven stories tend to emphasize the universal, but the best film stories are strong on both levels.  For instance, in The Godfather, the characters of Vito and Michael are unique individuals in a richly textured, historically rooted and fascinating world but they are also universal figures, father and son locked in a single, self-negating ambition.  The sins of the father are visited on the son.  

The universal level of story is archetypal and mythic.  The plot structures of great films, abstracted from the particulars, often read like myths or fairy tales. 

PLOT DESIGN VOCABULARY

BEAT: the smallest unit of meaning. 
SCENE: in continuous space and/or time, composed of beats, resolves itself in a perceptible change, however slight. 
SEQUENCE: a series of scenes that build toward and resolve in a more significant change. 
ACT: a series of sequences that build toward and resolve in an even more significant change.
STORY: a series of acts that build to a climax 
PLOT POINTS: The changes, at the ends of scences, sequences and acts.  These are the “turning points.”  (THE CLIMAX is the final PLOT POINT.)
REVERSALS and RECOGNITIONS.  The way things change in the story.  Each plot point will reverse a value, for instance moving us from hope to fear, and/or bring us to recognize some fact necessary to advance the story.   
CLIMAX: The final plot point.

SET-UPS and PAYOFFS