Beats in story structure

In a story it's very common for the audience to tell when a character shifts emotions when beats are present in the story's structure. Beats are when the viewers can see the moment a characters mood shifts from one emotion to another, mostly to an emotion opposite the one just before the beat, and make the characters more readable as a result. Beats also push the story forward, which leads to the construction of a film, beats lead to scenes, scenes lead to sequences, sequences lead to movies.

In the video, the beats present in the final confrontation between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are shown, and we see the importance of beats. At first, knowing Vader is his father and not wanting to fight him, Luke tries to bring out the human in Vader. However, wanting to instigate Luke, Vader digs into Luke's mind and starts to threaten to turn Leia to the dark side. This causes another beat, where Luke goes from calm and controlled to anger, and starts to fight Vader. This escalates until Luke cuts off Vader's hand, and we get another beat as Luke debates killing Vader, before refusing to give the emperor his wish to turn by killing Vader. This causes the emperor to attempt to kill Luke, and as this happens, Vader is now in the position to debate his next move. In the end, during a brief beat, Vader saves his son and kills the emperor.

These beats in this example show just how important beats in general are to move a story forward. Beats are not always used in film, and some films don't need beats to tell the story they're telling, however beats don't hurt a film's flow. Some beats can help use understand a character and build their personality, or beats can stay strictly to forwarding the story, that depends on the story being told.

Beats are part of the bigger picture, the scene, as sometimes without them a scene can drag or become awkward pacing wise. Once the scene is constructed, it gets put into the sequences that create the final product. So in theory, beats are one of the most important parts of a story's sequence, as beats are the building block of the film.

I honestly haven't even thought about the importance of beats, and now that I know more, I realized it's in a ton of films. Beats sometimes seem more powerful without dialogue, letting the characters expression show the beat, at least in my personal opinion. Beats are great elements, and some stories feel as if they would be better with them.

The video also does a great job at explaining beats. I could understand better with the example he used, and his explanation was very detailed in conveying his message. His humor also got a chuckle out of me to, and that's always and A+ in my book, better then it being boring.