#Exposition in film tv#
In contrast, radio and TV reports used to deliver exposition in awkwardly written screenplays tend to run on for many, many minutes and conveniently contain every piece of information the protagonist needs to understand his current predicament. Also, if you’re really interested in seeing/hearing a particular story, you usually have to wait through numerous other stories and commercial breaks before it finally airs.
Both usually contain only one or two pieces of information - usually the most sensationalistic ones, rather than the most pertinent – and are not particularly informative. In real life, most radio news reports run fifteen or thirty seconds and most television news reports last a half a minute to a minute and a half. Incredibly specific and detailed TV and radio newscasts that appear at exactly the right time. In real life, nobody talks this way, but in some spec scripts characters talk like this all the time and it never sounds any more believable than what I have written here. Oh, I talked to Doctor Johnson yesterday. His cast off a week ago Thursday and now he’s back to playing. Leg in two places during the homecoming game, but he got He had to take a few weeks off after he broke his Your son, Billy? Is he still captain of his college football Opened two summers ago is doing great business. It really helped me resolve that midlife crisis I I hope that the transition you made from beingĪ high profile defense attorney to being a middle school How are things in the accounting business?įine, Jeff. But it is a deathly dull, static, and stilted technique to employ in the cinema.ĭialogue in which the characters tell each other things they already know simply for our benefit.
This is a perfectly acceptable method to use in a stage play because theater is a dialogue centric medium and because the ability to present action with any size or scope is necessarily limited. Despite the “no brainer” obviousness of this notion, I read many, many specs in which the authors opt to discuss events rather than depict them. Therefore, it is always better to show an audience an event as it happens rather than have a character describe the event after it has occurred. They’re still low-res, unfortunately, but at least the files haven’t been put through YouTube’s compression filters.Having characters talk about important events in the story rather than showing those events happen on the screen.
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#Exposition in film archive#
Update: The Edison shorts and some other Exposition clips not listed above can also be found in the Edison film archive at the Library of Congress.