Jasper Claus's One Camera shop developed its own story-arc diagram across years of corporate-film practice. The diagram has a recognizable shape — the protagonist's arc starts at status quo (high), drops down into struggle (low), bottoms out at the dark night of the soul, rises through transformation, and resolves at victory (high again). Graphed, the shape resembles a bathtub — flat at the top, dropping down, flat at the bottom, rising up.
Claus calls it the bathtub story graph.1
The graph is operational — it is the structural template Claus's films use within the True Storytelling Method's story box. The bathtub-shape ensures the prior-pain establishment (the dropping-down) that the kama-muta-producing archetypes require. Films that follow the bathtub shape produce the kama muta their stories aim for; films that skip the dropping-down portion produce muted kama muta even when the rising-up portion is rendered well.
The full bathtub graph has approximately ten sections, deployed in sequence.
Section 1 — Status Quo. The protagonist resides in their current life. We meet them quickly. We recognize a little of ourselves in them. We empathize.
Section 2 — Inciting Incident. A situation arises that prompts the protagonist to take action. The status quo is disrupted.
Section 3 — Object of Desire. The protagonist identifies what they want — the goal that the inciting-incident has opened toward.
Section 4 — Action. The protagonist takes action toward the object of desire, expecting it will lead them straight to the goal.
Section 5 — Struggle (the dropping-down portion of the bathtub). The opposite of the protagonist's expectation happens — that is what produces a story. The struggle has three levels: physical (external obstacles), interpersonal (conflicts with other people), and internal (self-doubt, the deepest level).
Section 6 — Dark Night of the Soul (the bottom of the bathtub). Internal struggle has bottomed out. The protagonist has hit rock-bottom. This is the moment of maximum darkness.
Section 7 — Helping Hand / Inspiration. Someone or something appears to the protagonist offering possibility. The inspiration leads to a transformation within the protagonist.
Section 8 — Transformation (rendered as a powerful emotional moment). The protagonist changes. This is the structural pivot. The transformation must be written as a powerful emotional moment — not as a logical realization, but as an affective shift the audience can feel.
Section 9 — Second Decision. The transformed protagonist makes a major second-decision and fights with everything for one final time.
Section 10 — Victory and Object of Desire. Victory follows. The object of desire is in sight. The arc resolves.
The arc then transitions to the insight-bridge (Section 11 in the larger four-box method), the message (Section 12), and the logo (Section 13).
The struggle-section (Section 5) is the most operationally important part of the bathtub graph. Without sufficient struggle, the arc fails to produce kama muta at resolution. The struggle has three levels, deployed in order of increasing depth.
Level 1 — Physical struggle. External obstacles the protagonist confronts. The car breaks down. The weather makes the journey impossible. The institutional barrier blocks the application. Physical struggle is the surface-layer of struggle and the easiest to render. Films that include only physical struggle produce surface-engagement but not deep affective response.
Level 2 — Interpersonal struggle. Conflicts with other people. The spouse disagrees. The partner withdraws. The colleague obstructs. The institution's gatekeeper refuses. Interpersonal struggle is the middle-layer and produces deeper engagement than physical struggle alone. The audience can identify with relationship-conflict at depths the physical-struggle does not reach.
Level 3 — Internal struggle (self-doubt). The protagonist begins to doubt themselves. Am I the kind of person who can do this? Should I have made a different choice? Have I failed in a way that cannot be recovered? The internal struggle is the deepest layer. Films that engage internal struggle produce the affective depth that the dark-night-of-the-soul section requires. Films that skip internal struggle produce arcs that resolve too easily and do not generate the kama muta that the bathtub-shape is designed to produce.
The three levels are cumulative. Stories that operate all three levels produce stronger affective response than stories that operate one or two. Stories that operate only physical struggle remain at surface engagement. Stories that include internal struggle produce the dark-night-of-the-soul that the bathtub graph's structural integrity requires.
The cognitive mechanism: kama muta production depends on prior pain establishment (see reunion and redemption archetypes). The bathtub graph operationalizes the prior-pain through its sustained dropping-down section (Sections 4-6). The audience experiences the protagonist's struggle and dark-night-of-the-soul; the audience accumulates investment in the protagonist's plight; when the transformation (Section 8) and victory (Section 10) arrive, the audience's affective response is calibrated against the depth of the prior-pain they witnessed.
Without the bathtub-shape's sustained dropping-down section, the prior-pain is under-established. The transformation and victory arrive without the affective preparation that makes them kama-muta-producing. The same structural events (transformation, victory) land at much lower amplitude.
A second mechanism: the bathtub-shape provides narrative legibility. Audiences recognize the bathtub-shape across thousands of stories they have already absorbed. The recognition produces narrative-comprehensibility — the audience knows where they are in the arc, knows what is coming, anticipates the resolution. The legibility is not boring; it is satisfying. Audiences want the bathtub-shape because they recognize it as the architecture of stories-that-resolve-meaningfully.
A third mechanism: the bathtub-shape integrates three-level struggle in a way that engages the audience's nervous system across multiple registers. Physical struggle engages the audience's threat-detection. Interpersonal struggle engages the audience's social-cognition. Internal struggle engages the audience's self-recognition. The triple-engagement produces depth-of-investment that single-level struggle cannot reach.
The graph is the structural template that operates within the True Storytelling Method's story-box. The method's four-box sequence (story → insight → message → logo) routes through the bathtub-graph as the operational template for the story-box.
It engineers for kama muta by providing the prior-pain that the kama-muta-producing archetypes require. The bathtub-shape's dropping-down section is the structural mechanism that produces the prior-pain.
It pairs with negaphobia — the negaphobia critique addresses the corporate-client tendency to suppress the dropping-down section the bathtub-shape requires. The two principles together: bathtub-graph requires dropping-down; negaphobia suppresses dropping-down; the suppression prevents the bathtub-shape from producing its intended affective outcome.
It permits remixing (see remixing the story graph). The bathtub-shape's ten sections can be reordered using flashbacks, flash-forwards, or omitted-sections. The remixing maintains the structural integrity while accommodating shorter runtimes or multi-storyline structures.
Apply the bathtub-graph sections to the 30 Harvests film.2
Status Quo: The film opens with the farmer's pre-decision life — running the farm his father ran, raising his daughter on the land.
Inciting Incident: The financial pressures and climate changes that have made farming non-viable for him. The decision to leave.
Object of Desire: A future that protects his daughter from the agricultural struggle he is leaving.
Action: The decision to sell the farm and move to the city.
Struggle (three levels): Physical — the drought, the rising costs, the falling prices. Interpersonal — the conversations with his wife about leaving, the friends and neighbors also struggling. Internal — I can't fully wrap my head around how it didn't work. The internal self-doubt about whether he has failed, whether the dream was worth pursuing.
Dark Night of the Soul: one bad season can knock you and everyone you care about right over and that's not a good place. The farmer at his lowest point of internal struggle.
Helping Hand / Inspiration: The shift to the broader narrative about agricultural innovation and sustainability — the documentary-voices of farmers and researchers who are doing the work the protagonist's decision was abandoning.
Transformation: The realization that the agricultural story is not over — that the next 30 years matter, that the work continues even if his particular farm did not survive.
Second Decision: The decision to engage with the larger agricultural story rather than only with his own personal departure.
Victory and Object of Desire: The film's resolution — the farmer returns to the land in spirit, the agricultural sector's future is rendered as possible, the daughter inherits a story of continued possibility rather than only a story of loss.
Insight: We only have 30 harvests left to get it right.
Message: American farmers and ranchers are doing the work that matters.
Logo: US Farmers and Ranchers Alliance.
The bathtub graph operates with full structural integrity within the film's 5:30 runtime. The three-level struggle is rendered (physical drought, interpersonal family pressure, internal self-doubt about agricultural identity). The dark-night-of-the-soul is reached. The transformation is delivered as a powerful emotional moment. The kama muta the film produces is the structural consequence of the bathtub-shape operating with discipline.
You are constructing a story. You want to ensure the bathtub-shape is operating.
It is Sunday afternoon, 2:14pm. You're at the kitchen table with the story-outline. You draw a U-shape on a sheet of paper. You label the top-left status quo, the bottom dark night of the soul, the top-right victory. You write the ten sections in order along the U.
You map your story onto the U. You identify which scene serves which section. You discover gaps — your story has a status-quo and an inciting-incident, but the struggle-section is thin. The struggle-section only operates at the physical level; interpersonal and internal struggles are absent or underdeveloped.
You add the missing struggle-levels. The protagonist needs interpersonal struggle — what conflict with whom? You construct a specific scene. The protagonist needs internal struggle — what is the self-doubt content? You construct an internal-monologue moment that surfaces it.
You identify the dark-night-of-the-soul section. In your current outline, the protagonist's lowest point is the physical-struggle moment, not the internal-struggle moment. The dark-night-of-the-soul should be at the internal-struggle depth. You restructure so the dark-night-of-the-soul is the internal-doubt low.
You confirm the transformation is rendered as a powerful emotional moment, not as a logical realization. The protagonist's shift should be affective — the audience should feel the change, not be told about it. You revise the transformation-scene to operate at affective rather than expository level.
You re-read the restructured outline. The bathtub-shape is now fully operating. The three-level struggle is present. The dark-night-of-the-soul is the deepest point. The transformation is affective. The arc resolves at victory.
You construct the film against the restructured outline. The film produces kama muta at the structural resolution because the bathtub-shape operating with full integrity is what produces kama muta.
The pattern is: draw the U-shape; map sections; identify which sections are present and which are thin or missing; add the missing struggle-levels (especially internal struggle); ensure the dark-night-of-the-soul operates at internal depth; ensure transformation is affective rather than logical; construct against the restructured outline.
Your stories resolve too easily. The dropping-down section is under-developed. The audience does not experience prior-pain that the resolution can resolve. The fix is to deepen the struggle, especially at internal-struggle level.
Your protagonists never doubt themselves. Internal-struggle is absent. The dark-night-of-the-soul cannot operate without internal-struggle. The fix is to add specific self-doubt content to the protagonist's experience.
Your transformation scenes feel expository. The protagonist realizes something rather than feeling something. The transformation should be affective. The fix is to render the transformation as a powerful emotional moment with sensory specificity and felt-shift.
Your audience response is mild. The bathtub-shape is operating but not deeply enough. Probably the three-level struggle is incomplete. The fix is to deepen each struggle-level and ensure all three are present.
The bathtub-shape is a specific operationalization of the general narrative-arc principles documented across many traditions. Several other domains have formalized parallel structures.
Joseph Campbell's hero-journey monomyth: Campbell's monomyth (departure → initiation → return) has substantial structural overlap with the bathtub-graph. The departure corresponds to the inciting-incident-and-action sections; the initiation corresponds to the struggle-and-transformation sections; the return corresponds to the victory-and-resolution sections. Pairing Campbell's framework with Claus's bathtub-graph: Campbell supplies the deep cross-cultural research on the monomyth's universality; Claus supplies the corporate-film-specific operationalization for a particular runtime and purpose. Storytellers can productively study Campbell as deeper grounding for the bathtub-graph's structural choices.
Aristotle's Poetics / classical drama tradition: Aristotle's analysis of dramatic structure (rising action → climax → falling action → resolution) maps onto the bathtub-graph's drop-and-rise architecture. The classical-drama tradition has refined struggle-and-resolution structures across 2,500 years. Pairing classical drama with the bathtub-graph supplies both fields with refined vocabulary about the structural choices each makes implicitly.
Screenwriting craft / three-act structure traditions: The contemporary screenwriting tradition's three-act structure (Act 1 setup → Act 2 confrontation → Act 3 resolution) is a different operational template for the same underlying drop-and-rise architecture. The bathtub-graph's ten-section division is a more granular version of the three-act structure's higher-level divisions. Storytellers working across formats can productively cross-import the granular bathtub-sections into the screenplay-tradition three-act work, and vice versa.
The Sharpest Implication The bathtub-graph implies that most amateur and intermediate storytelling fails at the struggle-section — either under-developing it (insufficient prior-pain) or operating it only at physical-struggle level (missing the internal-struggle depth that the dark-night-of-the-soul requires). The fix is operationally available — the storyteller just needs to deepen the struggle-section, especially at interpersonal and internal levels. The improvement requires no additional craft-skill; it requires the discipline of operating the bathtub-shape at full depth. Many storytellers who plateau do so because they continue to under-develop the struggle-section even after they have learned every other craft-element. The bathtub-graph is the diagnostic that exposes this specific failure-mode.
Generative Questions