Hey folks, I recorded this video before it was announced so I didn't have time to include it in th ad-read but you can now give Nebula as a gift: gift.nebula.tv/thomasflight
I thoroughly enjoy your videos, as for Nebula, I tried it for a year when it first started. one thing keeping me from re-subscribing is lack of 4K/UHD support (at least that I can tell on my Apple TV app). I ended up watching many of your videos and other UA-cam creators on UA-cam instead because it was a noticeable improvement in video quality over Nebula app.
No one views exposition as a bad thing - bad exposition is bad, good exposition is good. Usually in film, exposition doesn't include dialogue - I think you're incorrectly explaining what "exposition" actually is from the get go.
I think the spirit of "show don't tell" becomes clearer when you realize the rule applies not just to visual media, but also to novels, where we can't literally "see" anything that happens. Everything is "told" to us in some sense, but within that we can still make the distinction. "Show don't tell" really means something closer to "Don't state, demonstrate."
That's true! Still, "show don't tell" is arguably more important in movies and TV than in novels. I don't know why, but the very same exposition that is boring in a movie can be perfectly fine in a book. Compare, for example, Lord of the Rings with its movie adaptation. The books contain a lot of background exposition while the movies cut most of that out in favor of fast pacing. I think it also applies to episodic TV shows that aren't so constrained by time.
@@cube2fox It's true you can get away with longer digressions from the plot in novels--but honestly I'm inclined to argue the rule if anything applies even MORE to novels, since efficiency isn't as much of a concern. You can afford time to show in detail what in a film you can't give more than a line or two. But that's almost just a semantic difference from what you're saying. The tricky thing is that in a novel, if you put ENOUGH detail into an exposition dump, it essentially ceases to be exposition and just becomes a flashback. A character talking for twenty minutes straight in a TV show might be bad writing, but in a novel it's just a new narrator.
@@robertmalone9511 Interesting point. In novels, long exposition becomes narration, and narration becomes flashback/action etc. Basically the text disappears in favor of what the text describes. That may seem as if "show don't tell" is satisfied automatically, but novels should still leave enough things to the reader to infer for themselves, just like movies, in which not all works succeed. I guess that's what you meant with "don't state, demonstrate". Still, I wonder why narrators are often so awkward in movies. They don't disappear like they do in books. Many movies specifically add sidekick characters which ask the main character "stupid questions" in order to avoid a narrator or inner monologue.
The first example from breaking bad is great for other reasons, too. Their son enters the room on crutches while they're both sitting, so despite being physically disabled has the dominant posture in the shot. The shot reaction shot is not showing his parents together, and they have varying reactions, implying they're split on the issue and how to handle it. Then when he treats the mother rudely it's not immediately reprimanded, showing both that this kind of talk is normal in their household, and they're even split on how to raise their son. Then when they're talking about the finances later, he's drinking in the kitchen and she's sitting on the counter ages away from him, creating distance and putting them both in different light, implying that they're not even on the same page as to the severity of or solution to their financial problems, and showing that it's putting a strain on the relationship not just by the way they talk and what they choose to avoid talking about. Exposition through dialogue is great, but incorporating it into framing, blocking, lighting and direction is so much harder.
Yeah and the other thing is they despite all this, despite how well they established how Walt and Skylar are never on the same page about anything and their relationship has been starting to crack since well before the show started, I really got a sense by episode 4 or so that they really did love eachother (at least at the start). One of my favorite pieces of exposition in the show is when Walt is telling Hank and Marie how he met Skylar and it causes Skylar to start crying, since this was right after Skylar learnt Walt has cancer. Through that exposition, we actually learn some big things about Walt: first we learn that Walt had rizz when he still had dreams and could be a genuine person, second we learn that he used to work at Los Alamos, which of course is one of the biggest and most legendary research centers in the US, showing how overqualified Walt truly is for his current job, and thirdly we learn how much Walt kinda doesn't care about the emotional consequences his actions have on Skylar.
Another factor is just how interested is the audience in getting the information delivered by the exposition? Like, in the Matrix, there's a scene where Morpheus just tells Neo what's going on in the real world. It's an extended minutes long sequence of pure exposition, delivered mostly through dialogue of one character talking. But it works, mostly because it's information that the audience has been teased with for the whole first act. They care a lot about getting all this revealed, so their tolerance for an extended exposition dump is as high as it can be. I think similar exposition dumps usually don't work because the viewer doesn't care enough about what's being revealed. The movie hasn't invested the time to make them care.
Also, Neo doesn’t know the information, so it makes sense that Morpheus is telling him. It’s such a simple thing, but filmmakers still often don’t account for why a character is saying the exposition.
Makes sense!! You can also see this in Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban, where Lupin and Sirius finally explain everything that's going on to the trio. Despite being a REALLY long info dump, the explanation is intriuging because you're hearing all this for the first time. Whereas upon rereads, you can notice how long it really is because you already know the information.
This is also why I think a lot of people misunderstand the architect scene from the sequel. People complain about it being confusing exposition but like... that's the point? The character doing the talking is a machine that considers humanity to be a resource; he's dumbing down his language the bare minimum required to be able to communicate in some sense with Neo. This is a conscious choice, and the only reason it works is because we (and Neo) are finally getting answers to questions we've had for 1.5 movies. It's also just nice to see someone in these movies regard Neo as something other than Computer-Jesus.
This is a great point. I'd also in that case the ideas contained within the exposition (especially in 1999) were just pretty novel and interesting on their own. This is part of what makes Inception's exposition partially forgivable (although there are some rough patches) because most of what they're explaining is actually kind of interesting. If the exposition is just menial details about the characters it's not nearly as interesting as information that is interesting to the audience on it's own.
Well, wait a minute. Ocean's is definitely an outlier in basically every cinematic metric. The script is insanely tight, and I hesitate thinking whether any scene in that movie is wasted. Every exposition-related scene is SO much "show don't tell" that it's just burned in my mind as the perfect example. To wit, half the dialogue is veiled references to things you have absolutely no idea what they are, but through context and body language alone can be deciphered. That's incredible scriptwriting and acting
@@Skyfalcon12345 so true looking back my favourite part of oceans 11 is them just talking about shit they’ve done which we have NO idea about. The scene where they discuss the team members needed with all the code names 🤌🤌🤌
one of my favorite examples of exposition in television is in the better call saul pilot when we see jimmy and kim’s first official interaction in the parking lot. how it starts with jimmy kicking the trash can in the elevator lobby and the camera slowly panning out to reveal kim standing there, not reacting, even though she can definitely hear him. then the way he walks up to her, takes the cigarette right out of her mouth, takes a drag, and then places it back into her mouth with her still barely reacting to the whole thing just so perfectly tells the audience that there is/was something more intimate between them; she knows him well. what makes it even better is the only two lines of dialogue in the whole scene being him saying to her regarding what he had just done in the hhm office “couldn’t you just-“ and her replying “you know i can’t” indicating this is not the first time he has done something like this, and that she would do this for him if she could. and it wraps up perfectly with her picking up the trash can he had knocked over, showing that she is always cleaning up his messes. it would’ve been easy for them to have jimmy make some comment about his past with kim to chuck or something but that would not be nearly as interesting. god i love that show
I just re-watched this episode (starting the whole series again with my children). My 14 year old said "But who is she?" and I said, "well we don't know yet, but what did you notice about their body language?" It's all there in the performances.
That whole just was just so great. The ending for the main story line is already spoiled. Saul lives, and becomes a shady lawyer. Boo hoo, he's never truly in danger. Yet every moment is still gripping. Like Breaking Bad, it's really a story about the journey, not the destination. Not "what" happens, but "how" it happens. Combined with great actors, it's just a pleasure to experience.
My favourite "exposition" is in the original Blade Runner when Deckard goes to the burlesque dance club and there's a boa snake in the changing rooms. He asks the dancer "is this real?" and she responds with "if that were real do you think i would work in a place like this?" to this day it blows my mind. that bit of dialogue tells you about the state of the fauna on earth and the economy and her social status ahhhh
Wait I'm guessing it works with the visual context of the scene, but seeing it written out and having not seen the movie, I just assumed she was saying "ain't no way I'd work in a place with a live boa"
Oh my god I spend so much time thinking about bad exposition, thank you for this. “Diana, we’ve been married for seven years, I think I know what kind of cake you want for your fortieth birthday party. My name’s Steve by the way.”
@@ThomasFlightI think a great example of visual exposition is in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The camera pans over Eddie’s desk and SO much information can be gathered there. I’ve always enjoyed the process of writing, but it’s the economic use of exposition that I consider to be the hardest puzzle to solve.
@@ThomasFlight Okay, but now I'm interested, because they've been married seven years but their son is in middle school. What's going on there? Is one a step-parent? Did they have Danny then break up then get back together? Did they just remain unmarried until he was six? I want to know.
@@davidbjacobs3598 Danny’s adopted. Diana and Steve decided that they would rather adopt than have a child of their own. Steve went through the foster system when he was young and vowed he would one day save a kid from having to go through that. They were planning on adopting more but just the one is quite the handful, and despite Diana’s mother’s passive aggressive remarks about “having at least one real kid”, they’re content with their family of three.
This makes me want to write an 80s style meta b movie. Just absolutely shit exposition and the characters look at the screen after every sentence of exposition 😂
The walter junior water heater scene (5:17) also shows a lot in the tone and reactions. There's no money AND Walter is ashamed in front of his son AND Skyler stresses about holding the family together. Breaking bad is great at moving multiple playing pieces with each event.
To be fair, in English people did address each other by title or familial relationship a lot more than they do now, & it is still very common in other languages, such as Korean. That example is set in Tudor England. It could be argued that people greeting each other like that is also creating a feel for the setting as well as being exposition.
Yeah but in Korean ''older brother/sister'' ''younger brother/sister'' also just means a friend who is older or younger than you, so it doesn't necessarily deliver the information needed to denote a familial relationship.
My sister and I talk *exactly* like this. Don't know why or how it started, but we call each other "sister" and "brother" exclusively. I've even started doing with my parents, calling them "mother" and "father" (ie. Good night father) and frankly, it feels great.
One aspect of forced exposition is the phrase "As You Know", which tends to be clunky. If the character apparently already knows the vital information, then why are you telling them? It's purely for the audience's benefit.
I think “as you know” has its place, depending how your characters talk. Like using it as a recap, then follow it up with new information as a twist. Kind of like this: Character 1: As you know, he was hit by a car, then ran from the scene, behind the building, then came back a minute later, right? Character 2: (annoyed) why are you telling me this? Character 1: Well, according to cctv, 3 men were waiting for him behind the building. Someone else went back to the scene in his place. Look. Character 2: (looking at cctv) …he was abducted…
'As you know' is the sort of thing that a real person would only ever say because they think the other person probably doesn't know or has forgotten, but they're hedging against being wrong/being passive aggressive about it.
if they're mocking someone it could feel natural, tbf. my bf and i say "do you remember when..." all the time but we exaggerate what happened to make fun of each other, like at least weekly. if i were writing it into a scene it would be to establish a playful tone. i think most any dialogue like that can work so long as you can make it feel natural to the characters and show something else about them or their relationship.
Then there's anime doing so much exposition, you become more confused lol: "Ahh. I can see he knows the ancient art of ShoeKicking because of the way he lifted his leg. And if he's willing to show me he knows this then it means my father is already dead, because about 5 days ago I received that message about a mysterious shoekicker while I was eating noodles. It made me stop eating them, which has never happened before. Therefore...."
I can't believe that the opening of _Lord of the Rings_ doesn't get a mention here. It's a couple of minutes of pure exposition, before any characters are introduced, takes place outside of any scene, is a monologue aimed solely at the audience, and even starts in a made-up language. It breaks every rule. And yet it's absolutely amazing. Sometimes, the trick might just be to have great exposition to tell, and not be shy about it; poorly disguised exposition might be the worse sort.
I don't think you were listening very closely. There are no bad forms of exposition, just poor execution and poor selection. When you've already got a 3 hour movie and need to dump a lot of information it isn't just acceptable to use a monologue, it might even be optimal.
To be fair, that also mainly works for people who like Lord of the rings in general. My parents tried watching them and didn't enjoy it and my dad to this day keeps making fun of the first 10 minutes being just exposition. Sure, it's done well but it also works because the story in general repels everyone who doesn't want to spend hours learning about middle earth.
At a writing convention I went to earlier this year, an author called Matthew Bockholt gave a presentation on another approach to the "Show, Don't Tell" concept he called, "Write What You Can't Say." There was a lot to it, but basically, taking the time to present an idea rather than reporting facts, to give an audience questions to fill in themselves rather than always give the answer right away. I think that's the kind of worldbuilding or scene-setting I enjoy most as a reader or audience member. He also suggested making the first draft without worrying about the specifics of how the exposition looks so it can be whittled into a more intriguing form later.
Your video made me realize something about the exposition in "Arrival". When you watch Dr. Banks watch television news, the exposition is no longer about aliens arriving. The most amazing thing in the history of the world JUST happened - and she's watching it alone in a dark house. She doesn't even rush to be with her mother. in one minute, we understand just how profoundly alone Dr. Banks is - and she never utters a word.
I think it better demonstrates that she is alone, but not lonely. My impression was that contrasting her reaction to others demonstrated that something was off about her because of how relatively unbothered/unsuprised she was. Same could be said about a lot of her other memories that were progressively revealed. It connects to how she was gifted with having a cyclic personal timeline-nothing could surprise her since she already experienced it, even if it was at a point in her life where she had yet to realize what was happening. Similarly, she may be alone after the people she loved left her, and alone in how she experienced the world, but the lack of linearity made it so she was not truly lonely.
The fact that Dave Bautista also puts on glasses tells us early that even though he's a replicant, replicants age and deteriorate like human beings, foreshadowing Harrison Ford appearing later and still potentially being a replicant, but also showing the humanity inside a replicant that this world ignores.
The problem with ending a video by segueing into an ad-read is that it ends up feeling like the video never ended properly. That is why I prefer midroll ads on UA-cam to the ones at the end.
When I think of an example of "master class in great exposition," I always think of the 1999 version of "The Mummy." Goofy action movie/blockbuster that it is, I consistently find cinematic appreciation for the way they tell the story. We not only get appropriately used (and not over-used) narration/voice overs, every bit of spoken exposition is lovingly baked into conversations that entertain as much as they inform. For example, one of the biggest pet-peeves I have in cinema is when a sibling is introduced the words "brother or a sister" (bro or sis, even) is forced into the conversation to explain the relationship, which usually never happens again in the film and tends to *feel* very much like blatant exposition. In contrast, in "The Mummy," Evelyn's brother is first introduced as with a *character- appropriate,* semi-sarcastic quip, "my dear, sweet, baby sister." It flows naturally and and sets the mood for character, which is my point. The film is full of moments like that: all pertinent details, from lore, mythos and credentials, are either shown or given in dialogue that feels natural to the characters and the situation, even when it's way over-the-top. It is just so...""chef's kiss" and I am glad to see the film given more appreciation in recent years.
That being said, OP is at risk of being wrong about the opening assertion cuz just because Nowadays Westeners don’t go “SISTER!” “BROTHER!” doesn’t automatically mean they weren’t like that in e.g. the Tutor Era. Don’t just use the Current Day sentiments to deem “Nobody talks like that” because plenty of people do it this very day, if outside the Anglosphere.
@@davidw.2791 Good point. Reminds me of the scene in The Horse and His Boy (yes, that's book exposition) where Edmund and Susan do call each other that (though not as the opening line of conversation), and since it's all old-time-y speak, it doesn't seem forced at all, it's just part of their elevated royal manner of speaking.
@davidw.2791I'd still disagree a bit. I think no matter the country or time period, there are formal & informal terms for familial bonds. Other languages have their own versions of "bro", "sis", "mommy/daddy", "granny/grandpa", pet terms for uncles & aunts, etc. I feel like modern writers put their preconceptions of older English as formal into their characters' dialogues, when they probably saw each other's English as normally as we see our own. If the characters aren't upper-class, I'd like to see them swear at each other, stutter, have weird humour, etc... as we've done for millennia. In fact, it's nice to see upper-class characters doing that in casual situations. I think it's not just the words, but the whole formal vibe around sibling characters that feels fake no matter the era. My fave examples surrounding this topic are Roman/Greek potty jokes, 1950's actors swearing in bloopers, or scathing insults in "ancient" languages like Hebrew.
My face lit up when 12 Angry Men came on screen OMG I was literally thinking about that film the entire time when this video was going on. How it can introduce 12 characters, and not only have it not be overwhelming, but develop all of them as their person, reveal things about their history and personality - ALL the while having the main conflict build. What a masterpiece.
It also has the best moment of 'turning on the news to see the subject being talked about' where they have to sit through unrelated stories and commercial breaks. "Now imagine the impact if that had come on just as I turned on the television!"
Micheal Corleone helping the nervous guard of the hospital light a cigarette on The Godfather is a brilliant piece of exposition so subtle most people miss. Another one is when Chigurh looks at the soles of his shoes at the end of No Country for Old Men.
One of the movies that makes great use of overt exposition is "The Terminator" (1984). Indeed, you can make a case that around half of the plot of The Terminator is conveyed to us through exposition. Why is the terminator here? Who sent it? Why is Reese here? Who sent him? Why is Sarah Connor being targeted? Why is she important? All of this is told to us explicitly by the character of Kyle Reese, in three key scenes. None of the exposition scenes are boring: one takes place during a car chase (and the lull in that car chase, hiding in a parking lot), one is a police interrogation, and the final one, a moment of calm at the start of the third act, transitions nicely into a "future flashback". All three are organic, and none of them feel clunky or forced. Also, importantly, we as an audience want to gain a better understanding of what's going on, and only Reese can really give us the answers we want. If you were going to explain the plot of The Terminator to somebody who had never seen the film, at least half of what you tell them is likely to be a precis of Reese's exposition dialog. The true Big Bad of the movie - Skynet - is never really seen in the film at all. It's an entity whose existence you know about purely through the anecdotes told to Sarah (and Silberman) by Reese.
Yeh nice one man. Terminator was peak action movie cinema. Its has all of the bombastic action you'd expect, Arnie as an absolutely badass villain and great storytelling. There's nice world building with Sarah's waitress job and how much it sucks. She's established as a likeable slightly ditzy suburb girl who is kind of a bit lost in life and bit of a wallflower at the same time which sets the crazy contrast with what she transforms into in the sequel. It spends just the right amount of time with Reese so he doesn't feel like a throwaway character just there as a plot device to keep the story moving. The pacing is great. It shows us how far action movies have fallen since. So many of the best action movies in the 80s and 90s had well written stories. The action was the icing on the cake. While today its all about the action while the story takes a back-seat. This is why most modern action movies suck and why the John Wick and Bourne movies stand out as the better types of modern action because they heavily incorporate an interesting story and world building.
That exposition scene from Three Body Problem is so unforgivable to me because the book has such a brilliant cinematic scene that explains how the accelerators are going against all of physics. The POV character is talking to a physicist friend of his who is drunk. The drunk friend is at a pool table and does an experiment. He knocks a ball into a pocket. Then he makes his friend move the whole pool table around the room three times to repeat the experiment in different parts of the room. By the end he's out of breath and barely finished his metaphor: the pool tables give the same result no matter the location of the table, but the accelerators are all giving different results. And as soon as he explains it, he passed out. End scene.
The writing on the Three Body Problem is terrible. The character dialogue is so cringe I about gave up on it. It only gets by on the brilliance of ideas in the source material
@@teneleven5132 The Tencent show does scenes like those justice. Like Wang Miao investigating the countdown and the cosmic background radiation in a scientific manner, or Ding Yi explaining how the laws of physics are broken through the table example. Though it is NOT necessarily better than the Netflix show, because of how repetitive and stretched out is. Still, it's highs are higher than the Netflix show and I'd suggest giving it a watch if you REALLY like the book. It's free on UA-cam.
Honestly, I think unless its absolutely necessary, there is no need to firmly establish characters relationships with each other. You can infer from peoples interactions that they're likely siblings, or past lovers. Having that aire of mystery about it just adds to the intrigue.
Agreed. A great example that comes to mind would be Matt and Elektra in the Daredevil series. While it's not the greatest show ever, I absolutely loved how the complexity of their relationship was immediately implied, yet obvious. Without any exposition whatsoever, from the very first scenes you understand that it's a long-lasting, problematic, heart-breaking situation just by the way they talk to each other. People understand relationships; show one on screen and we'll get it.
I agree! I noticed when I was first watching Better Call Saul that they didn't explain the nature of Jimmy and Kim's relationship. I remember being unsure if they were friends or lovers.
@@youllbemytourniquetyeah, they just had them share a cigarette in her smoke break. Ok. They are intimate, but maybe only office intimate, smoke break is a thing, and they don't mind sharing body fluids...
And sometimes it's completely obvious but the writers still decide to spell it out. Like, there's an adult woman next to a boy on a funeral, both looking kinda sad. Yeah, how could anyone guess who's funeral that ought to be. Of course we need the one guy patting the boy on the shoulder and telling him, "I'm so sorry for your father".
A fantastic example of voiceover is in The Batman. The whole introductory monologue is a journal entry. It gives crucial information about the setting and the psyche of the protagonist. Plus it’s stinkin cool.
my favourite FAVOURITE instance of exposition / infodumping is the opening to Hot Fuzz, where we get fed bullet-fast background info on nicolas angel telling us how proficient and overly-seriously he takes job as a cop. any other movie would have taken the show-don't-tell rule literally and decided to show us the protag at a crime scene and solving the case quickly, while the other cops roll their eyes and whisper among themselves about how stick-in-the-mud the protag is. that technically works, but it also 1) takes a lot of time 2) has been overdone to hell and back. by going the complete opposite route of just telling us everything right away, Hot Fuzz can get to the main story as quickly as possible WHILE STILL being able to give us ridiculous extra info (such as angel being a biking expert) that doesn't really matter to the story but tells us a lot about who angel is as a person. it also fits the overall vibe of the movie, a fast-paced over-the-top comedy. also, the crafty part of this infodump is that it doesn't tell you everything--it tells you JUST ENOUGH to get the story started. it doesn't tell you that angel's coworkers are jealous of him and dislike him and want him out of their precinct; they show this to us later on. it doesn't tell you angel takes his job so seriously that he has no friends and has trouble keeping his girlfriend; this is revealed when he has an argument with her later. and one last bit that makes this infodumping work: it's a voiceover that makes sense within the context of the movie itself. it's not just the protagonist telling the audience his own backstory; it's his sergeant reading through angel's profile before meeting with him. does it break the "show don't tell" advice? yes. but does it work? is it entertaining? does it give you the right amount of information without feeling forced and awkward? yes, and i think that matters more!
Hot Fuzz legit might be my favorite screenplay; not a single word wasted the entire way through and every little detail is in fact a joke whose punchline gets delivered later on in the movie. I feel like comedies, by nature, have their own rule wrt exposition where as long you can get a laugh out of it, you can get away with a good amount of telling over showing. Roger Rabbit has a great and I guess kind of recursive example of this with the scene in the speakeasy: "No, not at any time. Only when it was funny."
I mean think about it. Angel is married to the job, he's obsessed with it, his character being introduced with what is essentially his resume is perfect and the fact that they're able to pack quite a few jokes and gags into it ensures it's fun enough to grab the audiences attention and not so long as to overstay its welcome. There's also something about Martin Freeman's delivery that just makes it work.
@@Waverider781 Oh, excellent point about comedies! I got reminded of the Czech film Kulový blesk (Ball Lightning), which is about a crazy flat-swapping scheme, and spends about ten minutes at the beginning of the film expositioning about it... but since it's interspersed with character introductions and all their various idiosyncracies and off-topic questions et cetera, which is all very much what its humour is about, you don't really realise it takes _that_ long just to explain what the rest of the film will be about plot-wise.
I appreciate you clarifying that show don't tell can be about subtext - that the "showing" can still be with words rather than images. In my search for a similarly concise or pithy expression, I refer to this corollary as "Say; don't explain."
one of the most wonderful expansions on "show don't tell" i ever read was a slight shift into "describe don't explain" because with "show" people will assume u mean 'use less dialogue' or something similar. which is not the answer in every case. "desribe don't exaplin" is a great way to remind people to focus more on presenting the exposition without it feeling like a lesson to the audience, which i think a lot of clunky dialogue comes from. u want to describe to create an experience for an audience, not lecture to them
@@billyalarie929 oooh no but i will b checking them out thank u! i saw it originally a few yrs ago in a very long blog post that i wouldnt know where to start tracking down so have no clue of the OP
It's more "show the story, don't tell the story" If the story involves a character being told information by another character and YOU aren't forcing it but letting it naturally flow, it's showing. If YOU are telling the story, where you decide the audience needs to know this so i need character 1 to tell the audience this so I'll get them speaking to character 2, then it's telling. It all comes down to authenticity, is it YOU telling it, or is it the story/characters showing it
Another great moment of the exposition infodump comes from my all-time favorite film, Casablanca. The movie opens with a disembodied, authoritative voiceover explaining the refugee situation in World War 2. Interestingly, we don’t get this kind of omniscient, independent narrator played straight anymore; it shows up in comedies sometimes (see Arrested Development), or the narrator is one of the characters. The Casablanca exposition pairs visuals and riding dramatic tension through music and intonation to make this information seem important. This background helps us understand later plot points, such as the importance of a flight to Lisbon. Then (if I recall correctly) the film proper opens with the radio broadcast about the stealing of letters of transit. It’s brief, punchy, and sets up the vital MacGuffin for the plot. Then, the film switches over to extremely show-don’t-tell mode, and stays there most of the time. We watch interactions of multiple groups of refugees in the streets of Casablanca, and we FEEL their emotional states, the threats they live under, and what they’re hoping to achieve. Casablanca is just a masterclass of everything.
I once wrote a short about a man seeing his fiancé for the first time since leaving for medical school. A guy in a critique group told me, "Now, a basic principle in writing is, show don't tell. So maybe instead of TELLING us that he went to medical, you could have a flashback SHOWING him being in medical school." This is why you need to find a competent critique group.
Yeah people sometimes take "show don't tell" to an extreme. It would be kinda ridiculous to write a full flashback scene just to get the point across that the character had been in medical school. It's perfectly fine to include background details without having to show the character's whole life experience up to that point
Man, I had a Screenwriting 101 professor who gave me this kind of useless advice all the time. All of her critiques (such as telling me to take the talking animals out of a screenplay that was meant to be a fairy tale) just distracted me from what was ACTUALLY wrong with my work, like fuzzy character motivation and bad structure. The result was inevitably a second draft that was objectively worse and more confused than the first draft because I was trying to fulfill her arbitrary demands instead of shaping the story I was trying to tell into a more refined version of itself. (Come to think of it, I had multiple professors like this. Another one told me that my idea--not even a screenplay or a treatment, just a logline--about a man feeling increasingly distant from his wife was "boring" and that I could make it better by adding a werewolf into it. Keep in mind these were films we had to fund pretty much ourselves with minimal resources from the school itself.)
For me, one of the greatest exposition scenes in movie history is in the first pirates of the Caribbean. It's really random but the scene between Geoffrey Rush and Keira Knightley on the Black Pearl where he explains his curse and the medallion and finishes by biting the Apple and telling her she better start believing in ghost stories cuz she's in the one. The camera, the acting, the script, the set, this scene lives rent free in my mind as one of the greatest exposition scenes of all time despite it telling more than showing.
@@HBarnillYeah the movie also has a ton of excellent examples of the opposite kind of exposition. Will Turner also has excellent introductory scenes which get further built upon in subsequent scenes(as Will and his background is a central thing other character are trying to uncover).
I think this exposition works because we had the scene with the beginning of the movie being a dream/flashback that establishes the black pearl in relevance to the main characters (Will and Elizabeth's past) as well as establishing the myth/lore of this particular pirate ship. The jail scene also further establishes rhe lore of the ship and it's crew into a campfire ghost story. In a sense, all the demonstrating show scenes already happened, so we have the mystery with pieces of the puzzle and it gets the audience captivated with a child like intrigue so when we get to the pirate ship scene we are desperate for information, desperate for clarification as to what's real or not real about this ghost story. Thus, why the exposition is necessary but also very satisfying when the myths/the stories are confirmed to be true. Such great story structure with scenes that at first may seem unnecessary but prove to be for the set up of the big reveal/twist about the Black Pearl.
One of my fav exposition is when Mike in Better Call Saul tell story about his son. It was so heartbreakingly written and Jonathan Banks's delivery is top notch
I think a great example of exposition is used in the Malayalam movie mayanadhi . It's about an aspiring actress and her ex boyfriend (who is also a convict on the run ) meeting up 1 yr after their breakup (or more like him ghosting her ) . It isn't a conventional movie that is compartmentalised into different acts . In fact the whole movie begins with the 2 main leads meeting unexpectedly after their breakup, we as a audience isn't given a unnecessary narration as to what has happened , instead we pick it up from their conversation , their is little to no acknowledgement of the audience , in fact it feels like 2 ppl having a conversation and we are prying on them . And throughout the film we know little about the male lead apart from that he is her ex boyfriend and that he is on the run . We only get to know more of him from a conversation the female lead has with a friend of hers . And that was such a breath of fresh air to witness. For once the audience has to listen to the conversations to actually understand the story rather than everything thrown on their faces .
When you said, "Exposition is always going to be more interesting to the audience when we understand why this information is important to the characters", I immediately thought of the finale of "Chernobyl" in which Legasov explains the nuclear meltdown at Dyatlov & Co.'s trial-we need to know, it's what the whole series is building up to, how this awful catastrophe occurred, but it's also important for the in-world "audience" (those present at the trial) because they must make a legal determination based on their understanding of the events. It's also important for Legasov to communicate the information because in doing so he's able to expose the government's negligence. AHHH, SO GOOD! Great video 😃
@@TonyBlue87I mean tbf that's not really when the movie is giving that exposition, right in the opening scene you see Snoke clones and Palpatine basically said he was revived by using the dark side of the force. You can say that THAT is vague/lazy exposition but the "somehow palpatine returned" line isn't really relevant.
This is one of the main reasons I love Denis Villeneueve's films. In a good example, Alejandro's character in Sicario was originally supposed to have a lot more dialogue, with scenes of him expositing his whole backstory to Kate, but Villeneuve and del Toro decided it would be much more interesting to illustrate and slowly reveal this through his actions and snippets of speech, and adds so much intrigue and mystery to his character.
I like it when the exposition actually has an effect on the scene/characters. One shining example is Aliens, when Ripley is in the briefing meeting: she's finding out first-hand what happened to her colleagues, while also trying to impress upon the committee how lethal this creature is, while we also get to see how dismissive said committee can be (the foreshadowing itself is its own reason to be pissed off on Ripley's behalf) ... the marriage of the situation + writing + Sigourney Weaver's pitch-perfect acting manages to pump a dense amount of backstory + setup into one scene, and justifies Ripley's emotions/behaviour throughout - her anger, defiance, caution, distrust, grief, survivor/mother/badass-ness - all in one scene, in one room. It's exposition very well executed, charged with cause-and-effect that both belongs in this sci-fi otherworld and is very tangible and easy to sympathise with as an audience. Also, Black Mirror, especially the first two seasons. Masterclass in exposition, how it moves the short story along one choice, meaningful reveal at a time.
In that first scene of 3 Body Problem, they show the issue with physics on the monitor. But most viewers don't know how a collision graph should look since they're not physicists, so it has to be explained.
yeah exaclty and even if we knew that , the fact he said it again to his boss prove a point, first on his mind set and on how he feel about what could happen with this, it prove also that is being working on that for hours/days trying to understand what is that, so yeah i don t see that as "bad" writing
Exposition, when done perfectly, is capable of delivering the most emotional scene in the film. My favourite example is in How To Train Your Dragon 2 when Valka says the line "..but a mother never forgets". That line was so smooth and gut wrenching.
One of *my* favorite examples of brilliant exposition is the control room scene in Pixar's *Wall·E* where the captain furiously argues but fails to persuade Auto (Axiom's HAL-esque AI auto-pilot) to fly the ship back to Earth. He then looks at the portraits of all the captains that preceded him for generations, notices Auto ominously in the background behind every one of them in the photo, and realizes that the auto-pilot is the one really in charge of the ship, not the captain.
I'd argue that part of the line is not exposition. It's implication. Just like "No, you were only a babe." She doesn't just say she last saw him as a kid, or that she's his mom.
Primer is my favorite example of invisible exposition. The characters never sound like they're speaking for the benefit of the audience. You're there as a fly on the wall, listening to the characters talk to each other and if you pay close enough attention, you can start to piece together what they're doing...just in time to understand the reveal when the character understands it.
primer is super confusing the first watch through. It makes sense for a bit, but then it steps up into overdrive. Yes it all makes logical sense, but you really have to be paying attention, or have to read up on the movie
@@plr2473 I'ver never felt bad about not understanding every scene in Primer, I don't think it's required, and I suspect that it would take away from the experience. IMO the point of the last 30 minutes can be summed up as 'when you screw with time travel, things are gonna get FUBAR.' and that message is clear-as-day even if you can't figure out exactly which Adam is which. It's like Donnie Darko...there's a director's cut that 'explains' things, but the clarity detracts from the story rather than adding to it.
My problem with Primer is that the characters never once sound like real people throughout the entire movie. I get that some of that is purposeful because they are repeating lines from previous iterations (even when that doesn't make sense), but a lot of it just seems like bad acting.
8:20 You should watch 12 angry men. Period. One of the greatest movies ever made - its concept, acting and style are timeless. A great example of flawless storytelling. May not be everyone's cup of tea, but you can learn a lot from it about great storytelling.
He just gets it , when I’m thinking about plot lines and personality quirks for writing especially when talking about exposition, I know Thomas is going to explain it and analyze it perfectly . Love it Thankyou
@@_I-OvO-I_ That’s a profound perspective. I am glad to finally understand the root cause of my sister and I greeting each other in formal terminology is not simply an inside joke, between siblings(as we always perceived it to be). But in truth, was caused by the psychological damage of consuming the media of such uncivilized imbeciles. Thank you dear friend. I will strive to be more like you, and consume a higher grade of media, so that I no longer call my sister, sister. Thank you, you wise, noble, and mysterious messenger of truth.
Now I need to know what he said, because this is the most based reply ever... Either way, I also do this all the time with my siblings, usually as a joke though... It's usually followed up with one of us saying "I hate you"
An example of exposition that always got under my skin is from Candyman (2021) where one character (from the recently urbanised area) explains to the protagonist (an artist documenting the urbanisation of the same area) what gentrification is. Both clearly know that the other understands the concept but they shoehorn it in very heavy handedly and undermine the audience as a result.
Strongly agree. Gentrification should have been the subtext of the movie, instead they stop the narrative dead to have characters discuss gentrification for five minutes.
@@bartman999reminds me of the scene from Little Women where Florence Pugh delivers a melodramatic monologue about the struggles of being a woman in her time period
One of my favorite exposition drops I've ever seen is that beautiful scene in Eddie Valiant's office in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The staging of the props and photographs, Alan Silvestri's wonderful score, Bob Hoskins' humane performance, and each seamless movement of the camera tell you everything about Eddie's grief and who he is as a character without a single word spoken. It has always been the gold standard of exposition to me since I was a kid
Iconic exposition character: Doctor Emmett Brown in Back to the Future Iconic exposition scene: USS Indianapolis speech in Jaws Iconic exposition film: Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men
MY favourite bit of expo from Only Lovers Left Alive is when Eve talks to the plant using its scientific name, and she says it's too early (or too late) to be out this time of year or something along those lines. Like yeah, someone who lives 600 years would totally notice tiny things like that. If I were to ever write an immortal character I'm using that line as inspiration
heavy voice over enjoyer here, and one thing i love about it is how it can set the tone so well, for example Galadriel in lotr and Travis Bickle from taxis drivers opening monologue set the tone perfectly. extra shoutout to adaptation (2002) for being one of my other favorite uses of voice over.
Don Cheadle in the beginning of Crash was pretty good too. That whole movie had tons of good scenes actually. Like the 2 black guys lamenting at how they are being subtly treated like criminals in the mostly white area and then they ironically contradict themselves by joking "because we got guns" and go and rob some white people lmao. I love that you can't pinpoint which race or gender or religion is getting picked on because it's such a mess of humanity showing the best and worst of each character, leaving you with the understanding that we're all messed up but still have the ability to choose good and to see the good in others.
Can we take a moment to appreciate the way Thomas' editing is unlike any video essayist on UA-cam? He never bounces from movie to movie. Instead, he slows it down, treating each movie like a case study in the topic he's covering.
recently saw a movie that started with a press conference where journalists asked a lot of questions and had them answered. That felt plausible and organic.
It’s kind of interesting, because I don’t find the first conversation in the 3 Body Problem to be strange or too much of an unnecessary vehicle for exposition. This is often how I feel my colleagues and I talk to each other when trying to solve a difficult engineering problem. We lay out what we think we know already to try and make sure we don’t leave some root cause uncovered.
Exposition works when it’s in service of an argument. People naturally exposit when trying to convince others. “I wanted to be a gangster.” Works because the movie is Henry’s argument for why he loved the life, literally ending on him explaining how bad life is without it.
Hiding exposition in an argument, playful or not, is one of my favourite tricks. The tv show Leverage did it a lot. It gives the characters a reason to be talking to each other (even about something they already know), can run the gamut from hilarious to gutting, and how people communicate/react in arguments tells you a TON about the individuals and their relationships. You don't need your characters to tell the audience that they're siblings or ex-lovers or best friends if the audience watches them argue. As he said, having multiple layers of information is really key in making it feel organic.
Okay, YES. 12 Angry Men! One of my favorites of all time and just rewatched a few days ago. It's incredible in its subtle yet strong exposition through a dialogue-driven, singular location movie. I think all of the examples you used for displaying great feats of exposition done well treat the audience with respect and have them engage with the story rather than sit back and be told everything. Great video, Thomas!!
I was extremely into the lack of exposition in M Night Shyamalan's Glass, I saw it without knowing it was the third movie in a series. I was fascinated with how little the movie actually needed to tell me about these characters
one of the many reasons i love watching your videos is i have this evergrowing list of all the movies you speak of highly and many of them (especially the older ones) I have never heard of before, like the sopranos in this video, I'm definitelly watching that now! Thanks for all the work you put into these vids :)
It works because we the audience are learning things at the same time as the characters in the scene. Oh, and it’s also brilliantly edited and extremely funny, so, you know, there’s that.
@@GorgeDawesI'd say that we're not really learning something at the same time as the characters. We already know it's a zombie movie. We know there's going to be a zombie outbreak. We know all the little clues we've already seen are hints it's about to happen. But the characters don't know any of this, it's just a normal day to them.
great video! for me personally, Children of Men by Alfonso Cuaron is the manifestation of "show, don't tell" I love this movie so much for example in the first scene, they made use of the "TV broadcast exposition" while also introducing us to the main character to a certain extent AND having a dramatic (and by the way well shot) scene that reveals how instable the country is, in which the story takes place
I love the subtle clickbait of the thumbnail. So intelligent. I thought I would be watching a well articulated and researched video on how "everything is so dark nowdays". But I got a well articulated and researched piece on cinematography. Amazing.
I grew up with 80s and 90s videogames. Due to technological limitations, exposition was unavoidable in that media and we didn't even knew it had that name. Still, everything and lore the game machanics didn't show were welcome through exposition, the "good" and the "bad" kind, since it happened in rare occasions with simple information. I think that as videogames of that era progressed in technology and storytelling, they provided so many ways delivering information through text-telling that, today, when I watch a movie or read a book, I don't seek for it to correspond to actual real life interactions, but to convey information in a clear way (just like earlier videogames aimed). It's interesting because both examples the video mentioned about the Three Body Problem series episode... I found completely normal, dynamic and effective. (And I didn't even read the book or watched the series -- my first introduction to those characters was that one in the video). I guess the whole thing of "the proper way of making exposition" has its guidelines and a core on how to do it well, but the details are, perhaps, a more flexible thing. The background of what the viewer had previously experienced and grew used to matters a lot.
I read the books and I thought the show was fine with exposition in fact I think it Improved parts of the books that were sometimes pages and pages of exposition
@@vickdinvick5485Alfonso Cuaron and Rian Johnson are the same kind of brilliant: Their own projects and IP picks, sure; making something in the middle of a series, questionable. You won’t even believe Prisoner Of Azkaban was done by the same guy, in terms of screenplay & its execution re: Exposition et al. How COULD you change the book’s point that “Sirius Black was magically the ONLY person who knew the secret” to “he was ONE OF the few who knew”?? 🙃 Among many other things.
My favourite expository voiceover, at least off the top of my head right now, is Taxi Driver, because it gives you the view of Travis Bickle's fairly insane mind parallel to the more objective view of the camera, making it not just useful to speed up exposition, but something you could not get as well otherwise. Those kind of unique insights are probably the greatest advantage books have over films, where internal monologue is so easy.
One of my favourite ways to deliver exposition is when it happens in the middle of a big chase / action scene. The Bourne or Terminator series have loads of these.
I know that it is a different media, but Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events books have great exposition. I can't put it into words, but I savored every bit of information about the characters and the world.
The City of Brass trilogy is literature, not cinema, but its exposition is the best I’ve ever seen. You read the first book and it feels like a whole, complex, and complete story, but once you read the rest of the series you realize the first book was literally entirely exposition. It blew my mind. The series also does the dual perspective thing, which I enjoy, but while in most books with this type of writing, the separate characters meet each other within 5-10 chapters, if not right off the bat, in City of Brass they don’t even know the other exists until about 200 pages in. And even then, it takes another 50 for them to actually get to know each other, and by the end of the first book the romance (even the inkling of it) hasn’t even started yet. The story is driven by the plot and character development, not by the romance, which is so refreshing.
I think it's worth noting the power of NO exposition which can introduce confusion and enhanced curiosity by the viewer. A prime example of this, in my mind, was The Wire. There were many scenes where it felt like the viewer had been dropped into the middle of a conversation. This could be confusing, but it only raised the stakes and forces the viewer to pay attention. Eventually the viewer catches on and pieces things together. This work done by the audience has value and I wish it was done more often.
Right? That show was a different level. The lack of context and exposition gave it a kind of gritty realism I don't think anything has duplicated since
I think Memento has a great twist on this, in that a character has to tell himself what he doesn't know, because he can't retain information for any length of time.
glad you mentioned arrival. it shows in a "dazzling" way, where the start of the movie starts off with the audience being shown some weird vision that doesnt really make any sense. the alien's language, is shown. it makes the audience feel engaged, through their own capacity to pay attention or rather to see "what is going on" because of these showings. the emotional payoff at the end wouldn't be possible without some sense of showing, because SHOWING is one of the themes of the entire movie. showing, which is really observing (to show is to show to someone), isn't possible without time. moreover showing love isn't possible without time, feeling pain isn't possible without time.
Show / Tell was THE best lesson I learned. I would recommend as an exercise going completely overboard with “showing”, forcing it in almost, then go back and find where you need to dial it back. You’ll write page after page before you know it.
Personnaly, I love the introduction of 10 Cloverfield lane. There is almost no dialogue in the first minutes, and yet you learn everything you need to know about the main character.
My favourite exposition in a movie is the sadly late Donald Sutherland's entire part in JFK. It's like 20 straight minutes(!) of exposition but you're glued to the screen because of him. Quite literally a "could read a phone book" actor.
I immediately thought of the Severance pilot when I saw this video pop up in my feed. Creating a situation in which the exposition comes so naturally, which works two-fold (to introduce Helly's innie into this world and to help Mark getting used to his new tasks), is one of the most brilliant ways around it that I've seen, while keeping the audience gripped on just how this world works.
Favorite recent TV example of a delayed payoff exposition. "The Last of Us" Pilot. Ellie passing the time in Tess and Joel's apartment ***SPOILER*** Flips open the music book. Notices that a "Bill and Frank" have a code involving what decade a song comes from. Ellie pretends to have heard an 80s song on the radio while Joel was napping, his reaction confirms that "80s" means trouble. (And shows something of their personalities.) The 1987 Depeche Mode song "Never Let Me Down Again" closes the episode - but it's not soundtrack. It's on the radio in the now-empty apartment. At the end of the next episode alert viewers know that Tess's desperate idea to get Ellie to Bill and Frank probably won't work. At the end of the third episode Joel shows Ellie the "dead man's switch" Bill had, starting the 80s playlist after a certain period of inattention. Ellie is like I-toldya-so. And we remember the pilot had ended with Joel, Tess, and Ellie missing what was essentially Bill and Frank's death notice.
I think the important point with exposition is to think of layers of information. How many layers of information are you presenting? Take the scene with Walter jr vs an image of a bill with a past-due notice. The image of a bill with a past-due notice is likely only conveying one layer of information. whereas when Walter Jr is complaining about the water being out we get multiple layers of info 1) they are broke, 2) Walter jr feels comfortable being rude to his parents, 3) Skylar jumps in first, 4) Walter sr is passive. We learn a great deal by the negative space created around the behavior. Another thing to consider is that it helps when your narrator is ambiguously reliable. This is one of the things that makes heavily narrated movies like Fight Club and Memento work. it's even true of the Mad Max movies. An unreliable narrator inherently creates another layer of info: what is being said, what is being shown, and how the narrator stitches one into the other. In Fight Club, when Jack says ""she didn't belong", in the testicular cancer support group, that conveys more information than just showing here. The fact that Darla didn't belong is ridiculously obvious. the point isn't that she didn't belong, but that her not belonging annoys him in a way that doesn't bother the other guys. his reaction is the point, and that's what is still in the subtext. One important aspect of exposition is the opportunity cost of what is being said in relation to the negative space of what isn't being said. For example, "If I can be real with you for a moment," implies that you haven't been sincere previously. "Despite what you think, the world is indeed round" tells me that the group being spoken to are flat earthers.
Great video. Exposition via subtext is not just the most effective imo but also the most respectful. It demonstrates a writer understands that their audience is intelligent and capable of piecing information together.
One of the best examples of a voiceover clever exposition is the one at the start of Trainspotting. "Choose life". The sardonic way he describes a sober life in a way that makes it sound boring and soul crushing and part of a system he doesn't want to be part of. "Choose a fixed rate mortgage". The way it's contrasted with the chase scene. The way it echoes drug recovery language before it even reveals at the end that he's a heroin addict. Amazing.
100%. I had a graffiti battle with some other girl in the women's toilets at Curtin Uni (Perth, WA) in 2009-10 with that line. "Choose not to choose life". She crosses out -"Choose not to"- And I come back, couple weeks later, pretty impressed but also irritated, so I write it again: "Choose NOT to choose life!" She crosses it out again! -"Choose NOT to"- I'm thinking, girl, ain't you ever experienced that rush of endorphins? Never had chronic pain? Never had period pain? It went on a few times more. As far as I know, I got the last line. Guess she got that electric tin opener!
@@davidw.2791 Cause if you're born with the right amnt of endorphins, or if your body produces the right amount, you prob won't have to use opiates (at least not for most minor injuries, nor would you need them to feel normal ie with no pain, and defo not long term, like I have to for severe chronic pain; i was born with a lower level of pain that was triggered, in 2020, by a worldwide shortage of a period-pain specific birth control pill; now im housebound & mostly bedbound).
@@skullsaintdead Ah ok, for a while I was confused thinking Endorphins CAUSE pain because of the way I read your question “Do you feel Endorphins? Do you feel deliberating chronic pain?”
I can't explain it very eloquently, but recently I really liked the exposition in the anime Heavenly Delusion. The way it opens with these two people whose relationship is unclear but slowly fills in by how they interact was done really well. And when it does come time for a big exposition-y reveal about one of the characters they wait until 3 entire episodes in. The latest possible moment thing you mention made that reveal much more impactful for the audience now that we've spent a bit of time with this character. If it was episode 1 we the audience would think "ok cool" because we don't know this person. But by episode 3 we've spent enough time that this reveal both changes our understanding of who this character is, but also recontextualises some details the audience might've picked up before but dismissed. And the show is filled with storytelling beats being hit perfectly like that. As with any story that include sci-fi secret facility subplot I'm wary of how the story will continue, but from the 12 episodes we have now I'm very optimistic about this production. They're doing REALLY well.
On the same note of “12 Angry Men,” reading/watching plays is a fantastic way of learning how to do well done exposition dialogue. The modern play is usually written to have broad appeal production-wise so it can be produced in a large number of theaters with varying budgets, but that also means you can’t rely on a set or directorial choices to tell the whole story. Some pieces of info are vital for the audience to know, so the characters HAVE to say them in some way or another. A Raisin in the Sun (and its film adaptation) is another great example of the characters using dialogue to establish certain story beats (like the Younger’s financial troubles, Walter’s desires that lead to his errors in judgment, Beneatha’s attitudes about education and Afrocentricism, etc) that couldn’t be shown on a stage.
It's an interesting example because the books its based on are *notorious* for having poor wooden dialogue. It's my favorite book series, but the story is basically a vehicle for the author to convey his answer to the Fermi paradox, and so characters are very one dimensional and exist purely to convey this. The TV show, if you can believe it, actually gives the characters and dialogue more depth than the source material (at the massive expense of the actual science and ideas)
@@shridharambady2069 Common issue with sci fi. Writers are often more interested in conveying high level concepts and the actual story and characters come after.
@@shridharambady2069 By "depth", you mean intentionally adding a bunch of civilians and children into the Guzheng scene just so the main character can start feeling conflicted about the operation? That's stupid. I definitely agree that the latter half of the book is filled with tons of wooden exposition, but the first half was pretty good in terms of exposition and dialogue for a sci fi novel conveying unique ideas that were absolutely not in the Netflix show.
theres a malayalam short film called "night call" here on youtube. it only has one character and takes place in his house. i think it has done an excellent job in doing exposition the correct way. u might find it a bit awkward cuz its another language tho.
It already pops up in the video a couple of times but I've got give a shout out to Jurrasic Park for very effectively sidestepping a lot of potential clunkiness. The simple and quite frankly obvious solution of letting your intelligent characters actually be intelligent plays out excellently. The central trio are clearly smart and openly curious which allows them to explain things from their specific areas of expertise to the others and ask for explanations without seeming like they are denser than a box of rocks. It's very well done (too bad that Dr. Grant never had a chance to tell Muldoon his theories about how raptors would hunt, could have saved his life).
Those scenes aren't in the books. The exposition is done in different scenes in the books, which are much much better. Some of the changes in 3 body problem make sense, and overall the series is decent, but they also made some really unfortunate choices. The books are so damn good.
It deserves some, frankly. Especially mrs Salazar. For some reason it's the genius characters played by bad actors that usually scream "I need to be taken seriously" in a super cringy way.
First scene that came to mind for me was Snowpiercer when they get to the classroom and use the kids/video to inform the backstory of how everyone got here, while also adding this creepy cult-like devotion the higher class passengers have for Wilford, making the whole environment more unsettling and daunting.
The best piece of silent exposition I’ve ever seen is later into the first season of Arcane. There is a brief scene where Marcus is coming home from work (right before the scene with Silco and his daughter) and he catches a glimpse in the mirror as he puts his keys down. The way he looks himself in the eye tells us just how much he deeply, deeply hates himself. His regret for his past actions. His failure to protect his family. The shame he feels about the ironic hypocrisy of his everyday life. That one look betrays a self-awareness of his own cowardice and personal failings, and the devastating consequences thereof. All delivered with a single facial expression that lasts barely half a second. It’s truly incredible.
Hey folks, I recorded this video before it was announced so I didn't have time to include it in th ad-read but you can now give Nebula as a gift: gift.nebula.tv/thomasflight
what's the difference between your patreon and nebula?
I thoroughly enjoy your videos, as for Nebula, I tried it for a year when it first started. one thing keeping me from re-subscribing is lack of 4K/UHD support (at least that I can tell on my Apple TV app). I ended up watching many of your videos and other UA-cam creators on UA-cam instead because it was a noticeable improvement in video quality over Nebula app.
😅😅😅😊
No one views exposition as a bad thing - bad exposition is bad, good exposition is good. Usually in film, exposition doesn't include dialogue - I think you're incorrectly explaining what "exposition" actually is from the get go.
1:13 what is the movie ? Isn't that Taher Rahim? Madame web eh?
I think the spirit of "show don't tell" becomes clearer when you realize the rule applies not just to visual media, but also to novels, where we can't literally "see" anything that happens. Everything is "told" to us in some sense, but within that we can still make the distinction. "Show don't tell" really means something closer to "Don't state, demonstrate."
That's true! Still, "show don't tell" is arguably more important in movies and TV than in novels. I don't know why, but the very same exposition that is boring in a movie can be perfectly fine in a book. Compare, for example, Lord of the Rings with its movie adaptation. The books contain a lot of background exposition while the movies cut most of that out in favor of fast pacing. I think it also applies to episodic TV shows that aren't so constrained by time.
@@cube2fox It's true you can get away with longer digressions from the plot in novels--but honestly I'm inclined to argue the rule if anything applies even MORE to novels, since efficiency isn't as much of a concern. You can afford time to show in detail what in a film you can't give more than a line or two.
But that's almost just a semantic difference from what you're saying. The tricky thing is that in a novel, if you put ENOUGH detail into an exposition dump, it essentially ceases to be exposition and just becomes a flashback. A character talking for twenty minutes straight in a TV show might be bad writing, but in a novel it's just a new narrator.
@@robertmalone9511 Interesting point. In novels, long exposition becomes narration, and narration becomes flashback/action etc. Basically the text disappears in favor of what the text describes. That may seem as if "show don't tell" is satisfied automatically, but novels should still leave enough things to the reader to infer for themselves, just like movies, in which not all works succeed. I guess that's what you meant with "don't state, demonstrate".
Still, I wonder why narrators are often so awkward in movies. They don't disappear like they do in books. Many movies specifically add sidekick characters which ask the main character "stupid questions" in order to avoid a narrator or inner monologue.
Yes, obviously
trust me if youve ever read bad fanfiction you'll know why this is a golden rule.
The first example from breaking bad is great for other reasons, too.
Their son enters the room on crutches while they're both sitting, so despite being physically disabled has the dominant posture in the shot. The shot reaction shot is not showing his parents together, and they have varying reactions, implying they're split on the issue and how to handle it. Then when he treats the mother rudely it's not immediately reprimanded, showing both that this kind of talk is normal in their household, and they're even split on how to raise their son. Then when they're talking about the finances later, he's drinking in the kitchen and she's sitting on the counter ages away from him, creating distance and putting them both in different light, implying that they're not even on the same page as to the severity of or solution to their financial problems, and showing that it's putting a strain on the relationship not just by the way they talk and what they choose to avoid talking about.
Exposition through dialogue is great, but incorporating it into framing, blocking, lighting and direction is so much harder.
breaking bad has incredible exposition all throughout
Absolutely 💯 Breaking bad is the best show imo
Yeah and the other thing is they despite all this, despite how well they established how Walt and Skylar are never on the same page about anything and their relationship has been starting to crack since well before the show started, I really got a sense by episode 4 or so that they really did love eachother (at least at the start).
One of my favorite pieces of exposition in the show is when Walt is telling Hank and Marie how he met Skylar and it causes Skylar to start crying, since this was right after Skylar learnt Walt has cancer. Through that exposition, we actually learn some big things about Walt: first we learn that Walt had rizz when he still had dreams and could be a genuine person, second we learn that he used to work at Los Alamos, which of course is one of the biggest and most legendary research centers in the US, showing how overqualified Walt truly is for his current job, and thirdly we learn how much Walt kinda doesn't care about the emotional consequences his actions have on Skylar.
well said
@@swagmundfreud666 Aint no way you just used the word "rizz" while talking about the brilliant exposition in a scene from Breaking Bad
Another factor is just how interested is the audience in getting the information delivered by the exposition?
Like, in the Matrix, there's a scene where Morpheus just tells Neo what's going on in the real world. It's an extended minutes long sequence of pure exposition, delivered mostly through dialogue of one character talking.
But it works, mostly because it's information that the audience has been teased with for the whole first act. They care a lot about getting all this revealed, so their tolerance for an extended exposition dump is as high as it can be.
I think similar exposition dumps usually don't work because the viewer doesn't care enough about what's being revealed. The movie hasn't invested the time to make them care.
Also, Neo doesn’t know the information, so it makes sense that Morpheus is telling him. It’s such a simple thing, but filmmakers still often don’t account for why a character is saying the exposition.
Makes sense!! You can also see this in Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban, where Lupin and Sirius finally explain everything that's going on to the trio. Despite being a REALLY long info dump, the explanation is intriuging because you're hearing all this for the first time. Whereas upon rereads, you can notice how long it really is because you already know the information.
This is also why I think a lot of people misunderstand the architect scene from the sequel. People complain about it being confusing exposition but like... that's the point? The character doing the talking is a machine that considers humanity to be a resource; he's dumbing down his language the bare minimum required to be able to communicate in some sense with Neo. This is a conscious choice, and the only reason it works is because we (and Neo) are finally getting answers to questions we've had for 1.5 movies. It's also just nice to see someone in these movies regard Neo as something other than Computer-Jesus.
This is a great point. I'd also in that case the ideas contained within the exposition (especially in 1999) were just pretty novel and interesting on their own. This is part of what makes Inception's exposition partially forgivable (although there are some rough patches) because most of what they're explaining is actually kind of interesting.
If the exposition is just menial details about the characters it's not nearly as interesting as information that is interesting to the audience on it's own.
@@shar3859 Also its implied that Ron is dying of his injuries so it adds an element of suspense to the scene.
I think the only genre of film where I love “forced” exposition is heist films. Oceans introducing each member to showcase their skills, give me MORE
Yesssss the bests scenes r those exposition montages with a funky song playing and snappy edits
"you son of a bitch. I'm in"
Well, wait a minute. Ocean's is definitely an outlier in basically every cinematic metric. The script is insanely tight, and I hesitate thinking whether any scene in that movie is wasted. Every exposition-related scene is SO much "show don't tell" that it's just burned in my mind as the perfect example. To wit, half the dialogue is veiled references to things you have absolutely no idea what they are, but through context and body language alone can be deciphered. That's incredible scriptwriting and acting
@@Skyfalcon12345 so true looking back my favourite part of oceans 11 is them just talking about shit they’ve done which we have NO idea about.
The scene where they discuss the team members needed with all the code names 🤌🤌🤌
You son of a bitch, I'm in😎👉
one of my favorite examples of exposition in television is in the better call saul pilot when we see jimmy and kim’s first official interaction in the parking lot. how it starts with jimmy kicking the trash can in the elevator lobby and the camera slowly panning out to reveal kim standing there, not reacting, even though she can definitely hear him. then the way he walks up to her, takes the cigarette right out of her mouth, takes a drag, and then places it back into her mouth with her still barely reacting to the whole thing just so perfectly tells the audience that there is/was something more intimate between them; she knows him well. what makes it even better is the only two lines of dialogue in the whole scene being him saying to her regarding what he had just done in the hhm office “couldn’t you just-“ and her replying “you know i can’t” indicating this is not the first time he has done something like this, and that she would do this for him if she could. and it wraps up perfectly with her picking up the trash can he had knocked over, showing that she is always cleaning up his messes. it would’ve been easy for them to have jimmy make some comment about his past with kim to chuck or something but that would not be nearly as interesting. god i love that show
I just re-watched this episode (starting the whole series again with my children). My 14 year old said "But who is she?" and I said, "well we don't know yet, but what did you notice about their body language?" It's all there in the performances.
@@katerockpool3725 exactly! and they do a fantastic job
exactly the example I was thinking of! That scene is so perfect. Two lines, 7 words, and we instantly understand so much about their relationship.
BCS is the GOAT
That whole just was just so great. The ending for the main story line is already spoiled. Saul lives, and becomes a shady lawyer. Boo hoo, he's never truly in danger. Yet every moment is still gripping. Like Breaking Bad, it's really a story about the journey, not the destination. Not "what" happens, but "how" it happens. Combined with great actors, it's just a pleasure to experience.
My favourite "exposition" is in the original Blade Runner when Deckard goes to the burlesque dance club and there's a boa snake in the changing rooms. He asks the dancer "is this real?" and she responds with "if that were real do you think i would work in a place like this?"
to this day it blows my mind. that bit of dialogue tells you about the state of the fauna on earth and the economy and her social status ahhhh
I mean the movie has been showing that ever since we see LA raining like it’s London 😂❤
(Edited for typos)
Woah dude blade runner like blows my mind woah I'm braindead
@@davidw.2791 🤣🤣🤣🤣 never realised that ahahaaaa
Wait I'm guessing it works with the visual context of the scene, but seeing it written out and having not seen the movie, I just assumed she was saying "ain't no way I'd work in a place with a live boa"
Heston's reaction to the berry preserves carelessly left out on a counter in "Soylent Green."
Oh my god I spend so much time thinking about bad exposition, thank you for this. “Diana, we’ve been married for seven years, I think I know what kind of cake you want for your fortieth birthday party. My name’s Steve by the way.”
"Don't forget to pick up our son Danny from middle school on your way home from work."
@@ThomasFlightI think a great example of visual exposition is in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The camera pans over Eddie’s desk and SO much information can be gathered there. I’ve always enjoyed the process of writing, but it’s the economic use of exposition that I consider to be the hardest puzzle to solve.
@@ThomasFlight Okay, but now I'm interested, because they've been married seven years but their son is in middle school. What's going on there? Is one a step-parent? Did they have Danny then break up then get back together? Did they just remain unmarried until he was six? I want to know.
@@davidbjacobs3598 Danny’s adopted. Diana and Steve decided that they would rather adopt than have a child of their own. Steve went through the foster system when he was young and vowed he would one day save a kid from having to go through that. They were planning on adopting more but just the one is quite the handful, and despite Diana’s mother’s passive aggressive remarks about “having at least one real kid”, they’re content with their family of three.
This makes me want to write an 80s style meta b movie. Just absolutely shit exposition and the characters look at the screen after every sentence of exposition 😂
The walter junior water heater scene (5:17) also shows a lot in the tone and reactions. There's no money AND Walter is ashamed in front of his son AND Skyler stresses about holding the family together. Breaking bad is great at moving multiple playing pieces with each event.
It's also very realistic dialogue, and will hit close to home for anyone that has been in financial struggles with their family.
To be fair, in English people did address each other by title or familial relationship a lot more than they do now, & it is still very common in other languages, such as Korean. That example is set in Tudor England. It could be argued that people greeting each other like that is also creating a feel for the setting as well as being exposition.
Yeah but in Korean ''older brother/sister'' ''younger brother/sister'' also just means a friend who is older or younger than you, so it doesn't necessarily deliver the information needed to denote a familial relationship.
@sashatheelf well yeah, it's not exactly the same.
My sister and I talk *exactly* like this. Don't know why or how it started, but we call each other "sister" and "brother" exclusively. I've even started doing with my parents, calling them "mother" and "father" (ie. Good night father) and frankly, it feels great.
My sister and I sometimes do that as well. She'll even just call her spouse "husband" sometimes, and I probably would too lol.
One aspect of forced exposition is the phrase "As You Know", which tends to be clunky. If the character apparently already knows the vital information, then why are you telling them? It's purely for the audience's benefit.
"as you know, your father, Darth Vader, and I were great friends..."
"Your father, the king."
I think “as you know” has its place, depending how your characters talk. Like using it as a recap, then follow it up with new information as a twist. Kind of like this:
Character 1: As you know, he was hit by a car, then ran from the scene, behind the building, then came back a minute later, right?
Character 2: (annoyed) why are you telling me this?
Character 1: Well, according to cctv, 3 men were waiting for him behind the building. Someone else went back to the scene in his place. Look.
Character 2: (looking at cctv) …he was abducted…
"....but you already know that, don't you?"
'As you know' is the sort of thing that a real person would only ever say because they think the other person probably doesn't know or has forgotten, but they're hedging against being wrong/being passive aggressive about it.
"Do you remember that time when you..." with a LOOOOOT more detail than would be necessary in a normal conversation.
I HATE WHEN THEY DO THAT SOO MUCH. That in my book is breaking the fourth wall. (The watcher doesnt know so lets remind them) type shi
It’s only accurate when your boyfriend has ADHD and a terrible memory 😂
“remember when” is the lowest form of conversation
if they're mocking someone it could feel natural, tbf. my bf and i say "do you remember when..." all the time but we exaggerate what happened to make fun of each other, like at least weekly. if i were writing it into a scene it would be to establish a playful tone.
i think most any dialogue like that can work so long as you can make it feel natural to the characters and show something else about them or their relationship.
Then there's anime doing so much exposition, you become more confused lol: "Ahh. I can see he knows the ancient art of ShoeKicking because of the way he lifted his leg. And if he's willing to show me he knows this then it means my father is already dead, because about 5 days ago I received that message about a mysterious shoekicker while I was eating noodles. It made me stop eating them, which has never happened before. Therefore...."
I can't believe that the opening of _Lord of the Rings_ doesn't get a mention here. It's a couple of minutes of pure exposition, before any characters are introduced, takes place outside of any scene, is a monologue aimed solely at the audience, and even starts in a made-up language. It breaks every rule. And yet it's absolutely amazing. Sometimes, the trick might just be to have great exposition to tell, and not be shy about it; poorly disguised exposition might be the worse sort.
I might be wrong but I think I’ve seen him do an exposition video mainly on the lotr intro alone haha
I don't think you were listening very closely. There are no bad forms of exposition, just poor execution and poor selection. When you've already got a 3 hour movie and need to dump a lot of information it isn't just acceptable to use a monologue, it might even be optimal.
We all know this, as Thomas does also. The LOTR could and has had its own videos regarding every moment.
To be fair, that also mainly works for people who like Lord of the rings in general. My parents tried watching them and didn't enjoy it and my dad to this day keeps making fun of the first 10 minutes being just exposition. Sure, it's done well but it also works because the story in general repels everyone who doesn't want to spend hours learning about middle earth.
@@oyuyuyYou sound like you enjoy the smell of your own shit.
At a writing convention I went to earlier this year, an author called Matthew Bockholt gave a presentation on another approach to the "Show, Don't Tell" concept he called, "Write What You Can't Say." There was a lot to it, but basically, taking the time to present an idea rather than reporting facts, to give an audience questions to fill in themselves rather than always give the answer right away. I think that's the kind of worldbuilding or scene-setting I enjoy most as a reader or audience member.
He also suggested making the first draft without worrying about the specifics of how the exposition looks so it can be whittled into a more intriguing form later.
Seeing someone bring up "Before Sunrise" makes me so happy. It's such a great example of natural dialogue!! I adore that movie.
I literally put my hands over my heart when that clip showed up.
Your video made me realize something about the exposition in "Arrival". When you watch Dr. Banks watch television news, the exposition is no longer about aliens arriving. The most amazing thing in the history of the world JUST happened - and she's watching it alone in a dark house. She doesn't even rush to be with her mother. in one minute, we understand just how profoundly alone Dr. Banks is - and she never utters a word.
It adds contrast to what comes later in that through learning the heptapods language she can truly never be alone again.
That scene wasn't just good - it made me fall in love with the movie. It gave me such a sense of wonder.
I think it better demonstrates that she is alone, but not lonely. My impression was that contrasting her reaction to others demonstrated that something was off about her because of how relatively unbothered/unsuprised she was. Same could be said about a lot of her other memories that were progressively revealed. It connects to how she was gifted with having a cyclic personal timeline-nothing could surprise her since she already experienced it, even if it was at a point in her life where she had yet to realize what was happening. Similarly, she may be alone after the people she loved left her, and alone in how she experienced the world, but the lack of linearity made it so she was not truly lonely.
@@beanmeupscottythis is amazing. Thank you. Arrival is one of my favorite movies and this just opened up my eyes!
She's watching the news for details about what happened so the writer's can do exposition for the audience. Not everything is significant.
Thomas giving exposition on exposition is the meta I need to start off my week.
its too monday in the morning for my THC-addled brain to be kicking around the idea of potential meta-loops
Great critique of the wildly overrated 3 Body Problem, which was precisely as paper-thin as those final seasons of GoT.
And it was all an elaborate setup for a Nebula ad.
That’s Mr. Flight to you.
Or you can edit video like dunkey which is great example of showing but not telling also while saying a lot through editing alone
The fact that Dave Bautista also puts on glasses tells us early that even though he's a replicant, replicants age and deteriorate like human beings, foreshadowing Harrison Ford appearing later and still potentially being a replicant, but also showing the humanity inside a replicant that this world ignores.
And here I thought he wore fake spectacles for style
@@HungL0W and stylish they are
I thought he had them as PPE for the ass whoopin' on Joe.
Damn, that’s great observation
That always came across to me as a disguise he used to appear more human and hide the fact that he was a replicant.
The problem with ending a video by segueing into an ad-read is that it ends up feeling like the video never ended properly. That is why I prefer midroll ads on UA-cam to the ones at the end.
I circumvented this by just clicking off when I felt the video reached it's "ending" and thus, never saw the ad.
When I think of an example of "master class in great exposition," I always think of the 1999 version of "The Mummy." Goofy action movie/blockbuster that it is, I consistently find cinematic appreciation for the way they tell the story. We not only get appropriately used (and not over-used) narration/voice overs, every bit of spoken exposition is lovingly baked into conversations that entertain as much as they inform. For example, one of the biggest pet-peeves I have in cinema is when a sibling is introduced the words "brother or a sister" (bro or sis, even) is forced into the conversation to explain the relationship, which usually never happens again in the film and tends to *feel* very much like blatant exposition. In contrast, in "The Mummy," Evelyn's brother is first introduced as with a *character- appropriate,* semi-sarcastic quip, "my dear, sweet, baby sister." It flows naturally and and sets the mood for character, which is my point. The film is full of moments like that: all pertinent details, from lore, mythos and credentials, are either shown or given in dialogue that feels natural to the characters and the situation, even when it's way over-the-top. It is just so...""chef's kiss" and I am glad to see the film given more appreciation in recent years.
Oh ma god! Thank you!
You know a movie is about to have the siblings kill each other if it starts out with one of them joyously saying “BROTHER!”
That being said, OP is at risk of being wrong about the opening assertion cuz just because Nowadays Westeners don’t go “SISTER!” “BROTHER!” doesn’t automatically mean they weren’t like that in e.g. the Tutor Era. Don’t just use the Current Day sentiments to deem “Nobody talks like that” because plenty of people do it this very day, if outside the Anglosphere.
@@davidw.2791 Good point. Reminds me of the scene in The Horse and His Boy (yes, that's book exposition) where Edmund and Susan do call each other that (though not as the opening line of conversation), and since it's all old-time-y speak, it doesn't seem forced at all, it's just part of their elevated royal manner of speaking.
@@davidw.2791 had this exact thought seeing the clip placed at the beginning of the video.
Big thor and loki vibes lol
@davidw.2791I'd still disagree a bit. I think no matter the country or time period, there are formal & informal terms for familial bonds. Other languages have their own versions of "bro", "sis", "mommy/daddy", "granny/grandpa", pet terms for uncles & aunts, etc. I feel like modern writers put their preconceptions of older English as formal into their characters' dialogues, when they probably saw each other's English as normally as we see our own.
If the characters aren't upper-class, I'd like to see them swear at each other, stutter, have weird humour, etc... as we've done for millennia. In fact, it's nice to see upper-class characters doing that in casual situations. I think it's not just the words, but the whole formal vibe around sibling characters that feels fake no matter the era.
My fave examples surrounding this topic are Roman/Greek potty jokes, 1950's actors swearing in bloopers, or scathing insults in "ancient" languages like Hebrew.
My face lit up when 12 Angry Men came on screen OMG I was literally thinking about that film the entire time when this video was going on. How it can introduce 12 characters, and not only have it not be overwhelming, but develop all of them as their person, reveal things about their history and personality - ALL the while having the main conflict build. What a masterpiece.
One of the many reasons why I love 12 Angry Men as much as I do
Liturally liturally
You should also check "12" (2007 film), great remake
the only "hello, brother" i accept is Buster from Arrested Development
The "hello brother"-hate on the internet is always so funny because I've been calling my brother that for eternity 😅
It also has the best moment of 'turning on the news to see the subject being talked about' where they have to sit through unrelated stories and commercial breaks. "Now imagine the impact if that had come on just as I turned on the television!"
Annyong
@@anthonyfossi Hello Annyong
Azula
Micheal Corleone helping the nervous guard of the hospital light a cigarette on The Godfather is a brilliant piece of exposition so subtle most people miss.
Another one is when Chigurh looks at the soles of his shoes at the end of No Country for Old Men.
One of the movies that makes great use of overt exposition is "The Terminator" (1984). Indeed, you can make a case that around half of the plot of The Terminator is conveyed to us through exposition. Why is the terminator here? Who sent it? Why is Reese here? Who sent him? Why is Sarah Connor being targeted? Why is she important? All of this is told to us explicitly by the character of Kyle Reese, in three key scenes. None of the exposition scenes are boring: one takes place during a car chase (and the lull in that car chase, hiding in a parking lot), one is a police interrogation, and the final one, a moment of calm at the start of the third act, transitions nicely into a "future flashback". All three are organic, and none of them feel clunky or forced. Also, importantly, we as an audience want to gain a better understanding of what's going on, and only Reese can really give us the answers we want. If you were going to explain the plot of The Terminator to somebody who had never seen the film, at least half of what you tell them is likely to be a precis of Reese's exposition dialog. The true Big Bad of the movie - Skynet - is never really seen in the film at all. It's an entity whose existence you know about purely through the anecdotes told to Sarah (and Silberman) by Reese.
Yeh nice one man. Terminator was peak action movie cinema. Its has all of the bombastic action you'd expect, Arnie as an absolutely badass villain and great storytelling. There's nice world building with Sarah's waitress job and how much it sucks. She's established as a likeable slightly ditzy suburb girl who is kind of a bit lost in life and bit of a wallflower at the same time which sets the crazy contrast with what she transforms into in the sequel. It spends just the right amount of time with Reese so he doesn't feel like a throwaway character just there as a plot device to keep the story moving. The pacing is great. It shows us how far action movies have fallen since. So many of the best action movies in the 80s and 90s had well written stories. The action was the icing on the cake. While today its all about the action while the story takes a back-seat. This is why most modern action movies suck and why the John Wick and Bourne movies stand out as the better types of modern action because they heavily incorporate an interesting story and world building.
Cameron was smart enough to include exposition while the protagonists were constantly being hunted, making it palpable not boring.
Good point.
That exposition scene from Three Body Problem is so unforgivable to me because the book has such a brilliant cinematic scene that explains how the accelerators are going against all of physics. The POV character is talking to a physicist friend of his who is drunk. The drunk friend is at a pool table and does an experiment. He knocks a ball into a pocket. Then he makes his friend move the whole pool table around the room three times to repeat the experiment in different parts of the room. By the end he's out of breath and barely finished his metaphor: the pool tables give the same result no matter the location of the table, but the accelerators are all giving different results. And as soon as he explains it, he passed out. End scene.
That wouldve been lovely to see i the show, alas
The writing on the Three Body Problem is terrible. The character dialogue is so cringe I about gave up on it. It only gets by on the brilliance of ideas in the source material
@@TheMattyNation Yeah it's a shame considering the books are good
@@teneleven5132 The Tencent show does scenes like those justice. Like Wang Miao investigating the countdown and the cosmic background radiation in a scientific manner, or Ding Yi explaining how the laws of physics are broken through the table example. Though it is NOT necessarily better than the Netflix show, because of how repetitive and stretched out is. Still, it's highs are higher than the Netflix show and I'd suggest giving it a watch if you REALLY like the book. It's free on UA-cam.
Thank god i saw it was d&d adapting a book series so i just went to read them instead
look at that subtle off-white room lighting. the tasteful script writing.
oh my god. it even has a nebula ad read.
Let's see Paul Allen's exposition
🤣🤣
😭
Honestly, I think unless its absolutely necessary, there is no need to firmly establish characters relationships with each other. You can infer from peoples interactions that they're likely siblings, or past lovers. Having that aire of mystery about it just adds to the intrigue.
Tell that to the Luke & Leia shippers.
Agreed. A great example that comes to mind would be Matt and Elektra in the Daredevil series. While it's not the greatest show ever, I absolutely loved how the complexity of their relationship was immediately implied, yet obvious. Without any exposition whatsoever, from the very first scenes you understand that it's a long-lasting, problematic, heart-breaking situation just by the way they talk to each other.
People understand relationships; show one on screen and we'll get it.
I agree! I noticed when I was first watching Better Call Saul that they didn't explain the nature of Jimmy and Kim's relationship. I remember being unsure if they were friends or lovers.
@@youllbemytourniquetyeah, they just had them share a cigarette in her smoke break. Ok. They are intimate, but maybe only office intimate, smoke break is a thing, and they don't mind sharing body fluids...
And sometimes it's completely obvious but the writers still decide to spell it out. Like, there's an adult woman next to a boy on a funeral, both looking kinda sad. Yeah, how could anyone guess who's funeral that ought to be. Of course we need the one guy patting the boy on the shoulder and telling him, "I'm so sorry for your father".
A fantastic example of voiceover is in The Batman.
The whole introductory monologue is a journal entry. It gives crucial information about the setting and the psyche of the protagonist. Plus it’s stinkin cool.
"Nobody really talks like this."
-someone who clearly has never hung out with me and sister
I knew a family that called the one girl “sis” so you knew she was the sister of the group.
my favourite FAVOURITE instance of exposition / infodumping is the opening to Hot Fuzz, where we get fed bullet-fast background info on nicolas angel telling us how proficient and overly-seriously he takes job as a cop. any other movie would have taken the show-don't-tell rule literally and decided to show us the protag at a crime scene and solving the case quickly, while the other cops roll their eyes and whisper among themselves about how stick-in-the-mud the protag is. that technically works, but it also 1) takes a lot of time 2) has been overdone to hell and back.
by going the complete opposite route of just telling us everything right away, Hot Fuzz can get to the main story as quickly as possible WHILE STILL being able to give us ridiculous extra info (such as angel being a biking expert) that doesn't really matter to the story but tells us a lot about who angel is as a person. it also fits the overall vibe of the movie, a fast-paced over-the-top comedy.
also, the crafty part of this infodump is that it doesn't tell you everything--it tells you JUST ENOUGH to get the story started. it doesn't tell you that angel's coworkers are jealous of him and dislike him and want him out of their precinct; they show this to us later on. it doesn't tell you angel takes his job so seriously that he has no friends and has trouble keeping his girlfriend; this is revealed when he has an argument with her later.
and one last bit that makes this infodumping work: it's a voiceover that makes sense within the context of the movie itself. it's not just the protagonist telling the audience his own backstory; it's his sergeant reading through angel's profile before meeting with him.
does it break the "show don't tell" advice? yes. but does it work? is it entertaining? does it give you the right amount of information without feeling forced and awkward? yes, and i think that matters more!
Yes!!! I love hot fuzz and this info dumping scene is perfect, pure Edgar Wright magic!
Hot Fuzz legit might be my favorite screenplay; not a single word wasted the entire way through and every little detail is in fact a joke whose punchline gets delivered later on in the movie.
I feel like comedies, by nature, have their own rule wrt exposition where as long you can get a laugh out of it, you can get away with a good amount of telling over showing. Roger Rabbit has a great and I guess kind of recursive example of this with the scene in the speakeasy: "No, not at any time. Only when it was funny."
I mean think about it. Angel is married to the job, he's obsessed with it, his character being introduced with what is essentially his resume is perfect and the fact that they're able to pack quite a few jokes and gags into it ensures it's fun enough to grab the audiences attention and not so long as to overstay its welcome. There's also something about Martin Freeman's delivery that just makes it work.
@@Waverider781 Oh, excellent point about comedies! I got reminded of the Czech film Kulový blesk (Ball Lightning), which is about a crazy flat-swapping scheme, and spends about ten minutes at the beginning of the film expositioning about it... but since it's interspersed with character introductions and all their various idiosyncracies and off-topic questions et cetera, which is all very much what its humour is about, you don't really realise it takes _that_ long just to explain what the rest of the film will be about plot-wise.
Goddamn do I love this movie
I appreciate you clarifying that show don't tell can be about subtext - that the "showing" can still be with words rather than images. In my search for a similarly concise or pithy expression, I refer to this corollary as "Say; don't explain."
Perhaps "convey, don't explain"?
one of the most wonderful expansions on "show don't tell" i ever read was a slight shift into "describe don't explain"
because with "show" people will assume u mean 'use less dialogue' or something similar. which is not the answer in every case. "desribe don't exaplin" is a great way to remind people to focus more on presenting the exposition without it feeling like a lesson to the audience, which i think a lot of clunky dialogue comes from. u want to describe to create an experience for an audience, not lecture to them
In another comment someone said "Demonstrate, don't tell." I think that gets at what you mean?
I've seen a lot of clunky, pacing-killing descriptions too. Enough to make me immediately give up on stories.
Does somebody watch Shaelin Bishop?
@@billyalarie929 oooh no but i will b checking them out thank u! i saw it originally a few yrs ago in a very long blog post that i wouldnt know where to start tracking down so have no clue of the OP
It's more "show the story, don't tell the story"
If the story involves a character being told information by another character and YOU aren't forcing it but letting it naturally flow, it's showing.
If YOU are telling the story, where you decide the audience needs to know this so i need character 1 to tell the audience this so I'll get them speaking to character 2, then it's telling.
It all comes down to authenticity, is it YOU telling it, or is it the story/characters showing it
Oh my god, that exact scene in Three-Body Problem drove me INSANE for this reason
it made me quit after ep1
Another great moment of the exposition infodump comes from my all-time favorite film, Casablanca.
The movie opens with a disembodied, authoritative voiceover explaining the refugee situation in World War 2. Interestingly, we don’t get this kind of omniscient, independent narrator played straight anymore; it shows up in comedies sometimes (see Arrested Development), or the narrator is one of the characters.
The Casablanca exposition pairs visuals and riding dramatic tension through music and intonation to make this information seem important. This background helps us understand later plot points, such as the importance of a flight to Lisbon.
Then (if I recall correctly) the film proper opens with the radio broadcast about the stealing of letters of transit. It’s brief, punchy, and sets up the vital MacGuffin for the plot.
Then, the film switches over to extremely show-don’t-tell mode, and stays there most of the time. We watch interactions of multiple groups of refugees in the streets of Casablanca, and we FEEL their emotional states, the threats they live under, and what they’re hoping to achieve.
Casablanca is just a masterclass of everything.
I once wrote a short about a man seeing his fiancé for the first time since leaving for medical school. A guy in a critique group told me, "Now, a basic principle in writing is, show don't tell. So maybe instead of TELLING us that he went to medical, you could have a flashback SHOWING him being in medical school." This is why you need to find a competent critique group.
Yeah people sometimes take "show don't tell" to an extreme. It would be kinda ridiculous to write a full flashback scene just to get the point across that the character had been in medical school. It's perfectly fine to include background details without having to show the character's whole life experience up to that point
I think it could've been better if you just showed a diploma, simple yet effective
Man, I had a Screenwriting 101 professor who gave me this kind of useless advice all the time. All of her critiques (such as telling me to take the talking animals out of a screenplay that was meant to be a fairy tale) just distracted me from what was ACTUALLY wrong with my work, like fuzzy character motivation and bad structure. The result was inevitably a second draft that was objectively worse and more confused than the first draft because I was trying to fulfill her arbitrary demands instead of shaping the story I was trying to tell into a more refined version of itself. (Come to think of it, I had multiple professors like this. Another one told me that my idea--not even a screenplay or a treatment, just a logline--about a man feeling increasingly distant from his wife was "boring" and that I could make it better by adding a werewolf into it. Keep in mind these were films we had to fund pretty much ourselves with minimal resources from the school itself.)
@@erich6073 With people teaching and giving sh**y advice like that it's no bloody miracle most modern media sucks these days.
@@erich6073honestly adding a random rabid werewolf on a drama is a great way to turn it into an absurdist comedy if done early enough
For me, one of the greatest exposition scenes in movie history is in the first pirates of the Caribbean. It's really random but the scene between Geoffrey Rush and Keira Knightley on the Black Pearl where he explains his curse and the medallion and finishes by biting the Apple and telling her she better start believing in ghost stories cuz she's in the one. The camera, the acting, the script, the set, this scene lives rent free in my mind as one of the greatest exposition scenes of all time despite it telling more than showing.
Black pearl has a lot of expositions and to me its an example doing it well!
Jack Sparrow's entrance tells you everything you need to know about him without a single word.
@@HBarnillYeah the movie also has a ton of excellent examples of the opposite kind of exposition. Will Turner also has excellent introductory scenes which get further built upon in subsequent scenes(as Will and his background is a central thing other character are trying to uncover).
@@HBarnill J Depp was such a great cast for Pirates man.. He has to be one of the best at versatility imo.
I think this exposition works because we had the scene with the beginning of the movie being a dream/flashback that establishes the black pearl in relevance to the main characters (Will and Elizabeth's past) as well as establishing the myth/lore of this particular pirate ship. The jail scene also further establishes rhe lore of the ship and it's crew into a campfire ghost story. In a sense, all the demonstrating show scenes already happened, so we have the mystery with pieces of the puzzle and it gets the audience captivated with a child like intrigue so when we get to the pirate ship scene we are desperate for information, desperate for clarification as to what's real or not real about this ghost story. Thus, why the exposition is necessary but also very satisfying when the myths/the stories are confirmed to be true. Such great story structure with scenes that at first may seem unnecessary but prove to be for the set up of the big reveal/twist about the Black Pearl.
One of my fav exposition is when Mike in Better Call Saul tell story about his son. It was so heartbreakingly written and Jonathan Banks's delivery is top notch
I think a great example of exposition is used in the Malayalam movie mayanadhi . It's about an aspiring actress and her ex boyfriend (who is also a convict on the run ) meeting up 1 yr after their breakup (or more like him ghosting her ) . It isn't a conventional movie that is compartmentalised into different acts . In fact the whole movie begins with the 2 main leads meeting unexpectedly after their breakup, we as a audience isn't given a unnecessary narration as to what has happened , instead we pick it up from their conversation , their is little to no acknowledgement of the audience , in fact it feels like 2 ppl having a conversation and we are prying on them . And throughout the film we know little about the male lead apart from that he is her ex boyfriend and that he is on the run . We only get to know more of him from a conversation the female lead has with a friend of hers . And that was such a breath of fresh air to witness. For once the audience has to listen to the conversations to actually understand the story rather than everything thrown on their faces .
When you said, "Exposition is always going to be more interesting to the audience when we understand why this information is important to the characters", I immediately thought of the finale of "Chernobyl" in which Legasov explains the nuclear meltdown at Dyatlov & Co.'s trial-we need to know, it's what the whole series is building up to, how this awful catastrophe occurred, but it's also important for the in-world "audience" (those present at the trial) because they must make a legal determination based on their understanding of the events. It's also important for Legasov to communicate the information because in doing so he's able to expose the government's negligence. AHHH, SO GOOD!
Great video 😃
“Somehow Palpatine returned”
unintentionally the funniest bit of exposition i've ever seen
A great example of neither showing *nor* telling.
seriously worst writing of the 21st century.
The beginning of rise of skywalker is one of the most insane examples of forced exposition i have ever experienced
@@TonyBlue87I mean tbf that's not really when the movie is giving that exposition, right in the opening scene you see Snoke clones and Palpatine basically said he was revived by using the dark side of the force. You can say that THAT is vague/lazy exposition but the "somehow palpatine returned" line isn't really relevant.
My favorite writing hack: When a character does something unbelievable, have them say, "I can't believe I'm doing this."
😂😂
And when they tell a character what happened, they say "you're not gonna believe this"
@@GabrielsLogic Perfect!
Awesome whedon dialogue bro
‘You seeing this?’
‘Yep, that just happened.’
This is one of the main reasons I love Denis Villeneueve's films. In a good example, Alejandro's character in Sicario was originally supposed to have a lot more dialogue, with scenes of him expositing his whole backstory to Kate, but Villeneuve and del Toro decided it would be much more interesting to illustrate and slowly reveal this through his actions and snippets of speech, and adds so much intrigue and mystery to his character.
interesting. i always thought this was the way Taylor Sheridan wrote it, since he has said he hates (unnecessary?) exposition
i absolutely browsed for a comment mentioning Sicario ❤
I like it when the exposition actually has an effect on the scene/characters. One shining example is Aliens, when Ripley is in the briefing meeting: she's finding out first-hand what happened to her colleagues, while also trying to impress upon the committee how lethal this creature is, while we also get to see how dismissive said committee can be (the foreshadowing itself is its own reason to be pissed off on Ripley's behalf) ... the marriage of the situation + writing + Sigourney Weaver's pitch-perfect acting manages to pump a dense amount of backstory + setup into one scene, and justifies Ripley's emotions/behaviour throughout - her anger, defiance, caution, distrust, grief, survivor/mother/badass-ness - all in one scene, in one room. It's exposition very well executed, charged with cause-and-effect that both belongs in this sci-fi otherworld and is very tangible and easy to sympathise with as an audience.
Also, Black Mirror, especially the first two seasons. Masterclass in exposition, how it moves the short story along one choice, meaningful reveal at a time.
In that first scene of 3 Body Problem, they show the issue with physics on the monitor. But most viewers don't know how a collision graph should look since they're not physicists, so it has to be explained.
yeah exaclty and even if we knew that , the fact he said it again to his boss prove a point, first on his mind set and on how he feel about what could happen with this, it prove also that is being working on that for hours/days trying to understand what is that, so yeah i don t see that as "bad" writing
surprised fleabag wasn't mentioned, i feel like that show is the prime example of good exposition dumping
Season 2 is in my top three favorite things ever on film. Absolutely incredible.
NOT AT ALL
I binge watched that show and I agree ☝️
@@Pedro_Larroza
I legitimately wish i could value that show as much as you
I couldnt disagree more but im happy you enjoy it
God no
Exposition, when done perfectly, is capable of delivering the most emotional scene in the film. My favourite example is in How To Train Your Dragon 2 when Valka says the line "..but a mother never forgets". That line was so smooth and gut wrenching.
One of *my* favorite examples of brilliant exposition is the control room scene in Pixar's *Wall·E* where the captain furiously argues but fails to persuade Auto (Axiom's HAL-esque AI auto-pilot) to fly the ship back to Earth. He then looks at the portraits of all the captains that preceded him for generations, notices Auto ominously in the background behind every one of them in the photo, and realizes that the auto-pilot is the one really in charge of the ship, not the captain.
I'd argue that part of the line is not exposition. It's implication. Just like "No, you were only a babe." She doesn't just say she last saw him as a kid, or that she's his mom.
Not really exposition imo. Just a really good piece of dialogue.
Primer is my favorite example of invisible exposition. The characters never sound like they're speaking for the benefit of the audience. You're there as a fly on the wall, listening to the characters talk to each other and if you pay close enough attention, you can start to piece together what they're doing...just in time to understand the reveal when the character understands it.
primer is super confusing the first watch through. It makes sense for a bit, but then it steps up into overdrive. Yes it all makes logical sense, but you really have to be paying attention, or have to read up on the movie
@@plr2473 I'ver never felt bad about not understanding every scene in Primer, I don't think it's required, and I suspect that it would take away from the experience. IMO the point of the last 30 minutes can be summed up as 'when you screw with time travel, things are gonna get FUBAR.' and that message is clear-as-day even if you can't figure out exactly which Adam is which. It's like Donnie Darko...there's a director's cut that 'explains' things, but the clarity detracts from the story rather than adding to it.
I had to rewatch Primer and then google what was going on before I understood it. But I still don't think I fully understand it.
I love that movie!
My problem with Primer is that the characters never once sound like real people throughout the entire movie. I get that some of that is purposeful because they are repeating lines from previous iterations (even when that doesn't make sense), but a lot of it just seems like bad acting.
8:20 You should watch 12 angry men. Period. One of the greatest movies ever made - its concept, acting and style are timeless. A great example of flawless storytelling. May not be everyone's cup of tea, but you can learn a lot from it about great storytelling.
He just gets it , when I’m thinking about plot lines and personality quirks for writing especially when talking about exposition, I know Thomas is going to explain it and analyze it perfectly . Love it Thankyou
0:07 me and my sister DEFINITELY talk like this.... but to your credit, we probably do it because it is awkward, and inspired from awkward media.
@@_I-OvO-I_ That’s a profound perspective. I am glad to finally understand the root cause of my sister and I greeting each other in formal terminology is not simply an inside joke, between siblings(as we always perceived it to be). But in truth, was caused by the psychological damage of consuming the media of such uncivilized imbeciles. Thank you dear friend. I will strive to be more like you, and consume a higher grade of media, so that I no longer call my sister, sister. Thank you, you wise, noble, and mysterious messenger of truth.
Now I need to know what he said, because this is the most based reply ever...
Either way, I also do this all the time with my siblings, usually as a joke though... It's usually followed up with one of us saying "I hate you"
@@N0bodyn01oh god you Made him delete his comment with this reply
It may be awkward in the Anglosphere but millions of people elsewhere do it.
Ahaha😂 That's nice 😊
An example of exposition that always got under my skin is from Candyman (2021) where one character (from the recently urbanised area) explains to the protagonist (an artist documenting the urbanisation of the same area) what gentrification is. Both clearly know that the other understands the concept but they shoehorn it in very heavy handedly and undermine the audience as a result.
Strongly agree.
Gentrification should have been the subtext of the movie, instead they stop the narrative dead to have characters discuss gentrification for five minutes.
@@bartman999reminds me of the scene from Little Women where Florence Pugh delivers a melodramatic monologue about the struggles of being a woman in her time period
One of my favorite exposition drops I've ever seen is that beautiful scene in Eddie Valiant's office in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The staging of the props and photographs, Alan Silvestri's wonderful score, Bob Hoskins' humane performance, and each seamless movement of the camera tell you everything about Eddie's grief and who he is as a character without a single word spoken.
It has always been the gold standard of exposition to me since I was a kid
Shades of the camera exposition in Doc Brown’s garage-home, eh? Hint hint nudge nudge ❤
Iconic exposition character: Doctor Emmett Brown in Back to the Future
Iconic exposition scene: USS Indianapolis speech in Jaws
Iconic exposition film: Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men
MY favourite bit of expo from Only Lovers Left Alive is when Eve talks to the plant using its scientific name, and she says it's too early (or too late) to be out this time of year or something along those lines. Like yeah, someone who lives 600 years would totally notice tiny things like that. If I were to ever write an immortal character I'm using that line as inspiration
heavy voice over enjoyer here, and one thing i love about it is how it can set the tone so well, for example Galadriel in lotr and Travis Bickle from taxis drivers opening monologue set the tone perfectly.
extra shoutout to adaptation (2002) for being one of my other favorite uses of voice over.
Don Cheadle in the beginning of Crash was pretty good too. That whole movie had tons of good scenes actually. Like the 2 black guys lamenting at how they are being subtly treated like criminals in the mostly white area and then they ironically contradict themselves by joking "because we got guns" and go and rob some white people lmao. I love that you can't pinpoint which race or gender or religion is getting picked on because it's such a mess of humanity showing the best and worst of each character, leaving you with the understanding that we're all messed up but still have the ability to choose good and to see the good in others.
I was running the LOTR exposition through my head as I listened to this video.
Can we take a moment to appreciate the way Thomas' editing is unlike any video essayist on UA-cam? He never bounces from movie to movie. Instead, he slows it down, treating each movie like a case study in the topic he's covering.
Thanks for bringing up 12 Angry Men!! What an absolute writing masterclass of a movie. I need to rewatch it, it's been a year or two.
recently saw a movie that started with a press conference where journalists asked a lot of questions and had them answered. That felt plausible and organic.
It’s kind of interesting, because I don’t find the first conversation in the 3 Body Problem to be strange or too much of an unnecessary vehicle for exposition. This is often how I feel my colleagues and I talk to each other when trying to solve a difficult engineering problem. We lay out what we think we know already to try and make sure we don’t leave some root cause uncovered.
Multiple scientist said that scene is very accurate and they praised that scene for being exactly the way a lot of scientist talk
Exposition works when it’s in service of an argument. People naturally exposit when trying to convince others.
“I wanted to be a gangster.” Works because the movie is Henry’s argument for why he loved the life, literally ending on him explaining how bad life is without it.
Hiding exposition in an argument, playful or not, is one of my favourite tricks. The tv show Leverage did it a lot. It gives the characters a reason to be talking to each other (even about something they already know), can run the gamut from hilarious to gutting, and how people communicate/react in arguments tells you a TON about the individuals and their relationships. You don't need your characters to tell the audience that they're siblings or ex-lovers or best friends if the audience watches them argue. As he said, having multiple layers of information is really key in making it feel organic.
Okay, YES. 12 Angry Men! One of my favorites of all time and just rewatched a few days ago. It's incredible in its subtle yet strong exposition through a dialogue-driven, singular location movie. I think all of the examples you used for displaying great feats of exposition done well treat the audience with respect and have them engage with the story rather than sit back and be told everything. Great video, Thomas!!
I was extremely into the lack of exposition in M Night Shyamalan's Glass, I saw it without knowing it was the third movie in a series. I was fascinated with how little the movie actually needed to tell me about these characters
one of the many reasons i love watching your videos is i have this evergrowing list of all the movies you speak of highly and many of them (especially the older ones) I have never heard of before, like the sopranos in this video, I'm definitelly watching that now! Thanks for all the work you put into these vids :)
As someone who never plans on writing a screenplay, I found this SO fascinating!! You just got a new fan :))
Better Call Saul's pilot is excellent at "show don't tell", and I would argue the whole series excels at it.
The whole show does it so well there are a lot of things I missed because it’s so subtle
The whole show does it so well there are a lot of things I missed because it’s so subtle
this! you beat me to it
Some of the best use of inworld-media exposition has to be the TV montage from Shaun of the Dead.
That scene is genius
It works because we the audience are learning things at the same time as the characters in the scene. Oh, and it’s also brilliantly edited and extremely funny, so, you know, there’s that.
@@GorgeDawesI'd say that we're not really learning something at the same time as the characters. We already know it's a zombie movie. We know there's going to be a zombie outbreak. We know all the little clues we've already seen are hints it's about to happen. But the characters don't know any of this, it's just a normal day to them.
Starship Troopers for me
great video! for me personally, Children of Men by Alfonso Cuaron is the manifestation of "show, don't tell" I love this movie so much
for example in the first scene, they made use of the "TV broadcast exposition" while also introducing us to the main character to a certain extent AND having a dramatic (and by the way well shot) scene that reveals how instable the country is, in which the story takes place
I love the subtle clickbait of the thumbnail. So intelligent. I thought I would be watching a well articulated and researched video on how "everything is so dark nowdays". But I got a well articulated and researched piece on cinematography. Amazing.
I grew up with 80s and 90s videogames. Due to technological limitations, exposition was unavoidable in that media and we didn't even knew it had that name. Still, everything and lore the game machanics didn't show were welcome through exposition, the "good" and the "bad" kind, since it happened in rare occasions with simple information.
I think that as videogames of that era progressed in technology and storytelling, they provided so many ways delivering information through text-telling that, today, when I watch a movie or read a book, I don't seek for it to correspond to actual real life interactions, but to convey information in a clear way (just like earlier videogames aimed).
It's interesting because both examples the video mentioned about the Three Body Problem series episode... I found completely normal, dynamic and effective. (And I didn't even read the book or watched the series -- my first introduction to those characters was that one in the video).
I guess the whole thing of "the proper way of making exposition" has its guidelines and a core on how to do it well, but the details are, perhaps, a more flexible thing. The background of what the viewer had previously experienced and grew used to matters a lot.
I read the books and I thought the show was fine with exposition in fact I think it Improved parts of the books that were sometimes pages and pages of exposition
I think a brilliant bit of exposition/world-building is the opening scene of Children Of Men.
children of men is a masterpiece
@@vickdinvick5485Alfonso Cuaron and Rian Johnson are the same kind of brilliant: Their own projects and IP picks, sure; making something in the middle of a series, questionable.
You won’t even believe Prisoner Of Azkaban was done by the same guy, in terms of screenplay & its execution re: Exposition et al.
How COULD you change the book’s point that “Sirius Black was magically the ONLY person who knew the secret” to “he was ONE OF the few who knew”?? 🙃 Among many other things.
My favourite expository voiceover, at least off the top of my head right now, is Taxi Driver, because it gives you the view of Travis Bickle's fairly insane mind parallel to the more objective view of the camera, making it not just useful to speed up exposition, but something you could not get as well otherwise. Those kind of unique insights are probably the greatest advantage books have over films, where internal monologue is so easy.
"internal monologue is so easy" - anime has entered the chat
One of my favourite ways to deliver exposition is when it happens in the middle of a big chase / action scene. The Bourne or Terminator series have loads of these.
I know that it is a different media, but Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events books have great exposition. I can't put it into words, but I savored every bit of information about the characters and the world.
I love Lemony Snicket. Great writer, terrible firefighter.
The City of Brass trilogy is literature, not cinema, but its exposition is the best I’ve ever seen. You read the first book and it feels like a whole, complex, and complete story, but once you read the rest of the series you realize the first book was literally entirely exposition. It blew my mind. The series also does the dual perspective thing, which I enjoy, but while in most books with this type of writing, the separate characters meet each other within 5-10 chapters, if not right off the bat, in City of Brass they don’t even know the other exists until about 200 pages in. And even then, it takes another 50 for them to actually get to know each other, and by the end of the first book the romance (even the inkling of it) hasn’t even started yet. The story is driven by the plot and character development, not by the romance, which is so refreshing.
I think it's worth noting the power of NO exposition which can introduce confusion and enhanced curiosity by the viewer. A prime example of this, in my mind, was The Wire. There were many scenes where it felt like the viewer had been dropped into the middle of a conversation. This could be confusing, but it only raised the stakes and forces the viewer to pay attention. Eventually the viewer catches on and pieces things together. This work done by the audience has value and I wish it was done more often.
Right? That show was a different level. The lack of context and exposition gave it a kind of gritty realism I don't think anything has duplicated since
I think Memento has a great twist on this, in that a character has to tell himself what he doesn't know, because he can't retain information for any length of time.
glad you mentioned arrival. it shows in a "dazzling" way, where the start of the movie starts off with the audience being shown some weird vision that doesnt really make any sense. the alien's language, is shown. it makes the audience feel engaged, through their own capacity to pay attention or rather to see "what is going on" because of these showings. the emotional payoff at the end wouldn't be possible without some sense of showing, because SHOWING is one of the themes of the entire movie. showing, which is really observing (to show is to show to someone), isn't possible without time. moreover showing love isn't possible without time, feeling pain isn't possible without time.
Show / Tell was THE best lesson I learned. I would recommend as an exercise going completely overboard with “showing”, forcing it in almost, then go back and find where you need to dial it back. You’ll write page after page before you know it.
Personnaly, I love the introduction of 10 Cloverfield lane. There is almost no dialogue in the first minutes, and yet you learn everything you need to know about the main character.
Glad to see you used Severance as an example. Really looking forward to season 2. Everyone should see it!
It's so, so boring. And from reviews (at least from those not taken in by the blatant pretentiousness of the show) it seems it doesn't get better.
@@tbird-z1rSo the people who don’t like it also happen to think it’s bad? It feels a bit circular, no?
My favourite exposition in a movie is the sadly late Donald Sutherland's entire part in JFK. It's like 20 straight minutes(!) of exposition but you're glued to the screen because of him. Quite literally a "could read a phone book" actor.
Rip
A much smaller movie than JFK in terms of exposure but his exposition/showcase parts in the 1990 Norman Bethune movie was also great.
lol like Morgan Freeman. I could listen to him list all the street names in LA and be enthralled the whole time
I immediately thought of the Severance pilot when I saw this video pop up in my feed. Creating a situation in which the exposition comes so naturally, which works two-fold (to introduce Helly's innie into this world and to help Mark getting used to his new tasks), is one of the most brilliant ways around it that I've seen, while keeping the audience gripped on just how this world works.
How could anyone even get through that pilot. So boring, over-rated and pretentious.
Favorite recent TV example of a delayed payoff exposition.
"The Last of Us" Pilot.
Ellie passing the time in Tess and Joel's apartment
***SPOILER***
Flips open the music book.
Notices that a "Bill and Frank" have a code involving what decade a song comes from.
Ellie pretends to have heard an 80s song on the radio while Joel was napping, his reaction confirms that "80s" means trouble. (And shows something of their personalities.)
The 1987 Depeche Mode song "Never Let Me Down Again" closes the episode - but it's not soundtrack. It's on the radio in the now-empty apartment. At the end of the next episode alert viewers know that Tess's desperate idea to get Ellie to Bill and Frank probably won't work. At the end of the third episode Joel shows Ellie the "dead man's switch" Bill had, starting the 80s playlist after a certain period of inattention. Ellie is like I-toldya-so. And we remember the pilot had ended with Joel, Tess, and Ellie missing what was essentially Bill and Frank's death notice.
I think the important point with exposition is to think of layers of information. How many layers of information are you presenting? Take the scene with Walter jr vs an image of a bill with a past-due notice. The image of a bill with a past-due notice is likely only conveying one layer of information. whereas when Walter Jr is complaining about the water being out we get multiple layers of info 1) they are broke, 2) Walter jr feels comfortable being rude to his parents, 3) Skylar jumps in first, 4) Walter sr is passive. We learn a great deal by the negative space created around the behavior.
Another thing to consider is that it helps when your narrator is ambiguously reliable. This is one of the things that makes heavily narrated movies like Fight Club and Memento work. it's even true of the Mad Max movies. An unreliable narrator inherently creates another layer of info: what is being said, what is being shown, and how the narrator stitches one into the other. In Fight Club, when Jack says ""she didn't belong", in the testicular cancer support group, that conveys more information than just showing here. The fact that Darla didn't belong is ridiculously obvious. the point isn't that she didn't belong, but that her not belonging annoys him in a way that doesn't bother the other guys. his reaction is the point, and that's what is still in the subtext.
One important aspect of exposition is the opportunity cost of what is being said in relation to the negative space of what isn't being said. For example, "If I can be real with you for a moment," implies that you haven't been sincere previously. "Despite what you think, the world is indeed round" tells me that the group being spoken to are flat earthers.
When a character asks "why are you doing this?", all I hear "explain your motivation to the audience."
Great video. Exposition via subtext is not just the most effective imo but also the most respectful. It demonstrates a writer understands that their audience is intelligent and capable of piecing information together.
One of the best examples of a voiceover clever exposition is the one at the start of Trainspotting. "Choose life". The sardonic way he describes a sober life in a way that makes it sound boring and soul crushing and part of a system he doesn't want to be part of. "Choose a fixed rate mortgage". The way it's contrasted with the chase scene. The way it echoes drug recovery language before it even reveals at the end that he's a heroin addict. Amazing.
100%. I had a graffiti battle with some other girl in the women's toilets at Curtin Uni (Perth, WA) in 2009-10 with that line. "Choose not to choose life".
She crosses out -"Choose not to"-
And I come back, couple weeks later, pretty impressed but also irritated, so I write it again: "Choose NOT to choose life!"
She crosses it out again! -"Choose NOT to"-
I'm thinking, girl, ain't you ever experienced that rush of endorphins? Never had chronic pain? Never had period pain? It went on a few times more. As far as I know, I got the last line. Guess she got that electric tin opener!
@@skullsaintdeadWhy do you lump endorphins together with the pains
@@davidw.2791 Cause if you're born with the right amnt of endorphins, or if your body produces the right amount, you prob won't have to use opiates (at least not for most minor injuries, nor would you need them to feel normal ie with no pain, and defo not long term, like I have to for severe chronic pain; i was born with a lower level of pain that was triggered, in 2020, by a worldwide shortage of a period-pain specific birth control pill; now im housebound & mostly bedbound).
@@skullsaintdead Ah ok, for a while I was confused thinking Endorphins CAUSE pain because of the way I read your question “Do you feel Endorphins? Do you feel deliberating chronic pain?”
@@davidw.2791 Lol yeah, no worries! Can defo see how you'd interpret that.
I can't explain it very eloquently, but recently I really liked the exposition in the anime Heavenly Delusion.
The way it opens with these two people whose relationship is unclear but slowly fills in by how they interact was done really well.
And when it does come time for a big exposition-y reveal about one of the characters they wait until 3 entire episodes in.
The latest possible moment thing you mention made that reveal much more impactful for the audience now that we've spent a bit of time with this character.
If it was episode 1 we the audience would think "ok cool" because we don't know this person. But by episode 3 we've spent enough time that this reveal both changes our understanding of who this character is, but also recontextualises some details the audience might've picked up before but dismissed.
And the show is filled with storytelling beats being hit perfectly like that. As with any story that include sci-fi secret facility subplot I'm wary of how the story will continue, but from the 12 episodes we have now I'm very optimistic about this production. They're doing REALLY well.
On the same note of “12 Angry Men,” reading/watching plays is a fantastic way of learning how to do well done exposition dialogue. The modern play is usually written to have broad appeal production-wise so it can be produced in a large number of theaters with varying budgets, but that also means you can’t rely on a set or directorial choices to tell the whole story. Some pieces of info are vital for the audience to know, so the characters HAVE to say them in some way or another. A Raisin in the Sun (and its film adaptation) is another great example of the characters using dialogue to establish certain story beats (like the Younger’s financial troubles, Walter’s desires that lead to his errors in judgment, Beneatha’s attitudes about education and Afrocentricism, etc) that couldn’t be shown on a stage.
I'm glad you included the three body problem because I couldn't stand the dialogue.
It's an interesting example because the books its based on are *notorious* for having poor wooden dialogue. It's my favorite book series, but the story is basically a vehicle for the author to convey his answer to the Fermi paradox, and so characters are very one dimensional and exist purely to convey this. The TV show, if you can believe it, actually gives the characters and dialogue more depth than the source material (at the massive expense of the actual science and ideas)
@@shridharambady2069honestly prefer the relatively simple book characters to the cringey millennials
that three body problem scene had legit 'The neutrinos have mutated' vibes
@@shridharambady2069 Common issue with sci fi. Writers are often more interested in conveying high level concepts and the actual story and characters come after.
@@shridharambady2069 By "depth", you mean intentionally adding a bunch of civilians and children into the Guzheng scene just so the main character can start feeling conflicted about the operation? That's stupid. I definitely agree that the latter half of the book is filled with tons of wooden exposition, but the first half was pretty good in terms of exposition and dialogue for a sci fi novel conveying unique ideas that were absolutely not in the Netflix show.
theres a malayalam short film called "night call" here on youtube. it only has one character and takes place in his house. i think it has done an excellent job in doing exposition the correct way. u might find it a bit awkward cuz its another language tho.
Where are the English subtitles for that?
@@4ofdubs I think it's in yt itself. Try going to settings and settings subtitles to english (uk)
It already pops up in the video a couple of times but I've got give a shout out to Jurrasic Park for very effectively sidestepping a lot of potential clunkiness. The simple and quite frankly obvious solution of letting your intelligent characters actually be intelligent plays out excellently. The central trio are clearly smart and openly curious which allows them to explain things from their specific areas of expertise to the others and ask for explanations without seeming like they are denser than a box of rocks. It's very well done (too bad that Dr. Grant never had a chance to tell Muldoon his theories about how raptors would hunt, could have saved his life).
The commentary on how well Succession delivers its exposition in Episode 1 is excellent.
my favourite piece of exposition in anything is in Shaun of the Dead when they flip through all the TV channels
Every time I hear someone say "hot water heater" I die a little inside.
"ATM machine" is another one that causes that feeling.
@@EveloGraveit’s such an redundant tautology.
@EveloGrave RIP in peace.
It's unnecessary exposition, really
PIN number
3 body problem getting random strays is so funny
Maybe I'm just bitter about what those guys did to GoT
Those scenes aren't in the books. The exposition is done in different scenes in the books, which are much much better. Some of the changes in 3 body problem make sense, and overall the series is decent, but they also made some really unfortunate choices. The books are so damn good.
@@ThomasFlightdespair
It deserves some, frankly. Especially mrs Salazar. For some reason it's the genius characters played by bad actors that usually scream "I need to be taken seriously" in a super cringy way.
I read the book
I was excited
I saw some scenes on yt
Now iam not
First scene that came to mind for me was Snowpiercer when they get to the classroom and use the kids/video to inform the backstory of how everyone got here, while also adding this creepy cult-like devotion the higher class passengers have for Wilford, making the whole environment more unsettling and daunting.
The best piece of silent exposition I’ve ever seen is later into the first season of Arcane. There is a brief scene where Marcus is coming home from work (right before the scene with Silco and his daughter) and he catches a glimpse in the mirror as he puts his keys down. The way he looks himself in the eye tells us just how much he deeply, deeply hates himself. His regret for his past actions. His failure to protect his family. The shame he feels about the ironic hypocrisy of his everyday life. That one look betrays a self-awareness of his own cowardice and personal failings, and the devastating consequences thereof. All delivered with a single facial expression that lasts barely half a second. It’s truly incredible.