PLOT STRUCTURE

Although The Bodice Ripper's plot can be divided conventionally into three acts I was more influenced by David Siegel's 9 Act Story Structure, an attempt to categorize what makes a commercially successful movie. His "acts" include a good back story to set the plot in motion, a great opening shot, false goals, reversals and real goals. The Bodice Ripper has all those things but it's main purpose is satirizing Victorian lives to highlight the foibles in modern life.

Action (red) is carefully manipulated by producer Joel Silver's whammos. Whammos are periods of action/excitement that come between scenes of plot/character development. Naturally most whammos in this story are attacks by the Bodice Ripper as shown by the victim's name in white. Fairly regular spacing of whammos keeps the plot flowing. The dip in action between "Museum Victim" and "Queen Victoria" introduces the romantic subplot and sets up the rising action of the sub-climax (Victoria) and main climax (Big Ben).

My goal was to explore as much Victorian society as possible to satirize timeless conflicts between personal and public lives. Therefore over the course of  two hours the plot rises from a whore attacked in the slums through the social classes (yellow) to the top of society then plummets in the last scene to another whore in danger in the alley it started in. This links the end of the story to the beginning in a circle. In fact, the very first image in the opening frame is a circle, the moon. For more on circles see below.
 

CIRCLES

Not only do the first and last scenes link to form a circle, circles are emphasized throughout the script.

	My breast like Albert Memorial Dome	Big Ben, the scene of the climax	The Ripper's escape balloon is a very mammary sphere.
The sun and moon recur in transitional shots often emphasizing the passage of time.	A hypnotist's watch	Primitive Lumiere projector lens.	Thomas Crapper & Co. toilet bowl "The Venerable"
Antique light bulb