Save the Cat Beat Sheet Generator

A beat sheet is the skeleton of a story before the scenes exist: fifteen moments every satisfying movie tends to hit, in the order they come, with roughly where each one lands. Writers use it to find the shape of an idea in an afternoon, to check a draft that feels flat, and to pitch a story in five minutes.

The method comes from Blake Snyder’s screenwriting books. It is a guide, not a law: a beat can come a few pages early or late, and the best scripts bend it. What matters is that each beat does its job: the catalyst really breaks the old life, the midpoint really raises the stakes, and the final image really answers the first one.

The method was written for a 110 page feature. This generator scales it to your script: a 90 page comedy, a 120 page drama, a 30 page pilot or a 10 page short. Each beat keeps its share of the story, so the catalyst lands about a tenth of the way in, the break into act two about a fifth, the midpoint at half and the break into act three at about four fifths.

• One page beats (the Catalyst, the Midpoint, All Is Lost) are moments: a single scene or even a single line.
• Long beats (the Set-Up, Fun and Games, Bad Guys Close In, the Finale) are stretches of several scenes.
• In a short film several beats share a page. That is normal: some become one shot.

The method sorts stories by what they are about, not by their setting. Pick the one that fits your logline and the turning beats get a note for that kind of story.

• Monster in the House: A monster, a house the heroes cannot leave, and a sin that let it in.
• Golden Fleece: A road, a team and a prize, where the journey changes the hero more than the prize does.
• Out of the Bottle: A wish or a curse comes true, and the hero has to learn to live without the magic.
• Dude with a Problem: An ordinary person, an extraordinary problem, and a fight for survival.
• Rites of Passage: A life problem everyone goes through: growing up, grief, a break-up, a middle-age crisis.
• Buddy Love: Two people who complete each other, at first at odds, who need each other to become whole.
• Whydunit: A detective, a secret and a dark turn: the question is why, not who.
• Fool Triumphant: An underestimated hero, an establishment that looks down on them, and a fool who wins.
• Institutionalized: A group, a choice between the group and the self, and the cost of either.
• Superhero: A hero with a gift, a world that does not understand them, and an opponent who mirrors them.

Download the sheet as Fountain notes and open it in any screenwriting app that reads Fountain: each act and beat becomes a section with your text as its synopsis, an outline that never prints. Or open it straight in the AI Script Writer, write the scenes under each beat, and ask the AI Script Doctor where the draft drifts from its beats.