Setup and Payoff; The Rule of Threes
This interesting little essay by Dan Olson is a reaction on a segment from his earlier video about the editing of Suicide Squad, in which he highlighted a screenwriting ‘Rule of Threes’*:
"There is this really old stand-by rule in screenwriting: The Rule of Threes. You set up an idea, you remind the audience, then you pay it off. [setup-reminder-payoff] It’s a rule because it is a really effective way of keeping the audience informed about smaller details the characters would be familiar with. So that, when they come into play, they don’t feel like they’re coming out of nowhere."
In this follow-up essay he elaborates on this, because he feels some commenters seem to miss his point. Basically what he means with this rule of three is this: if you have a gag of some kind, you’ll need to properly introduce it, for it to payoff. On top of this you will usually remind the audience (at least) once of the gag you’ve set-up, just so they’ll remember the gag when it comes into play at the payoff. So the rule of three is: 1. Setup, 2. Reminder, and finally, 3. Payoff.
As he explains in this video, the infamous Chekhov’s Gun also comes into play. This is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot. So much so, that you might at times get confused about it’s meaning. It basically comes down to this: if you introduce an outlandish element to your story, something strange, extreme, threatening, something that in whatever way stands out: it better be there for a reason.
"The idea isn’t just that something should show up three times but, as per Chekhov’s Gun, it should do something. (…) Three is really just a convenient number. It has a good rhythm. And, once something has happened three times in a row, we instinctively start to feel like it is intentional rather than random. Three is indicative of a pattern.
Even simpeler than the psychology of patterns, though, is just basic information juggling. Managing the human memory. If someone is watching a movie, or a play, or television, they’re actually taking in a lot of information at a more or less constant rate for upwards of several hours.
The reminder stage of the rule of threes is really just about helping the audience keep track of something set-up in the first 20 minutes, that’s not going to be relevant for another two hours. If the span of time between setup and payoff is much shorter, then there is no need for a reminder, because it is still fresh in the audience’s mind. Well, if the time between is much, much longer, then either you’ll need more reminders or you’ll just need to spend more time embedding it in the audience’s memory."
*Although in this video this Rule of Threes is presented as some well established piece of screenwriting wisdom. I actually hadn’t heard it mentioned like this before and I can’t find too many references to it in this way, either. But although maybe not that well known under this name, this is of course a very well known and much used storytelling technique.
