How To Use Hollywood’s 3-Act Structure In Your Corporate Videos

In Hollywood, the 3-act structure is ubiquitous. It’s in every single TV show and movie. And it’s a super simple technique to understand the much more complicated “hero’s journey” that governs all of storytelling. But more importantly, it’s an easy technique to use in crafting compelling corporate videos for your brand or business.

In this post, I want to describe the three-act structure, show you how it’s used, and show you how you can use it to up your storytelling game and make some amazing corporate videos.

What Is The 3-Act Structure?

Picture the hero of a movie. We usually don’t meet them in the middle of fighting their ultimate nemesis, right? We meet them as they’re living their normal life. Then some complication happens and their world gets turned upside-down. So, in very simple terms, the three act structure is broken into:

1. Set-up: We see the hero’s normal life, or the “before,” until they’re confronted with a complication when we jump into the…

2. Confrontation: The hero is brought out of their comfort zone and is forced to deal with this new dilemma, culminating with them conquering this new force, bringing us right into the…

3. Resolution: The hero has fought off the bad guys, and has established a new normal for themselves in the process.

Let’s take a look at how this looks in a famous film we all know.

The 3-Act Structure in Practice

We'll start with maybe the ultimate blockbuster movie… Jaws. I'm going to take you through the exact same three-part story structure we went through in the last section, but using the three act story of Jaws.

1. Set-up: Regular guy, police chief, Martin Brody, in a regular beach town, Amity Island.

2. Confrontation: The shark attacks some swimmers and nobody wants to do anything about it. Brody has to take things into his own hands, go out and defeat the shark himself.

3. Resolution: The shark is defeated, Brody has saved the day, the beach is rid of the shark. But we’re in our new normal – we, including the 1970’s audiences, can never feel too safe in the water ever again.

You can picture this escalation and dénouement as a bell curve that rises and then falls but never reaches the place we started.

This is really just a distillation of the way we've told stories for most of humanity. There's something visceral and innate about it that makes it perfect for capturing attention and weaving the viewer into the story with them. Suddenly, they can empathize and feel what the characters are feeling. It's exactly this that makes the 3-act structure crucial for use in your corporate videos.

Using The 3-Act Structure In Your Corporate Videos

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This type of storytelling engages audiences and customers alike. Because instead of just hearing about your business, they’re being told a story with characters they can root for. Let’s take a product video, for example. It’s one thing to talk about what your product can do. But making it real and having the audience sympathize with what your product can solve for them takes it to a whole new level.

So, you might start with a potential customer who has a problem. This product solves that problem and allows them to combat whatever they were fighting. For example, a project manager has no simple way to deal with their workflow. They use your business’ CRM and now they’ve reached their new normal – a world where they have more time on their hands and things run seamlessly.

Similarly, in telling your company’s story – talking about your sales and demographics doesn’t really capture somebody’s attention. But telling the story about a founder who wanted to solve X and did so with this service or product, and now has reached a new place as the leader in their field – that is a story a customer can get behind.

Keeping this structure in mind for corporate videos, internal and external communications, and even in meetings can truly give a boost to your company’s and your own standing, and capture attention wherever it’s needed.