

This scene, which moves from the lobby to the street and to a cab, is the only part of the film that “sets up” his character.
#EXPOSITION IN FILM MOVIE#
The first scene of the movie features Roger Thornhill (Carey Grant) dictating instructions to his secretary. The first way to cover exposition is demonstrated in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece North by Northwest (1959), written by Ernest Lehman. Technique #1: Deliver Through Movement, An Energetic Scene In this article, we’re going to take a look at a handful of successful films and illustrate five helpful techniques that work when dealing with the problem of exposition. Meanwhile, the audience gets bored – and if that audience is people who read scripts for a living (including actors, agents, and producers) that boredom can mean they stop reading. They resort to clumsy voiceovers, have characters tell each other things they both already know for the sake of the audience, and generally spend way too much “setting up” their story.

What happened before the film started? What does the audience need to know to understand the story?įrequently, you’ll see young writers struggle. Break a leg, superstars.Exposition is one of the biggest challenges a young writer faces when trying to tackle a new script.


To quote The Departed quoting Hamlet, “The readiness is all”-if you’ve eaten, drunk, and bathed in great movies, you’re not just equipped to write, but to stand on their shoulders and write something better. It’s your set-up and their spike, your genesis and their revelation, your script and their interpretation. The work directors do may be what people celebrate over yours, but you’re the one that assigned them that labor. A screenwriter sketches, a director paints. Writing a movie isn't an exact science like baking or a manifested blueprint like knitting, but also if you Jackson Pollack your way through the keyboard, don't be surprised if your GoFundMe resembles an Ancestry. We, as a society, often mistakenly believed the mavericks that changed the world were so countercultural that they didn't even know the culture when in reality they were so over-researched that they could back up their theses. But a good script asks questions, and any microcosmic circumstance can be fit over a larger metaphor a good script will invoke social commentary whether it likes it or not.Īs always, remember that every feature on How-To-Art is your mom's new boyfriend and you don't have to listen to it. It can just be Molina and the solar apocalypse-the kids are big on that. Does your script need social commentary? No. What is the film’s social commentary? It’s so loaded with questions and provocative images that the Rorschach blackens the entire canvas. Jim Uhls’ Fight Club is one of the most debated movies in modern history, on one hand, adored by masculine young folks who believe their hierarchical dominance is regularly usurped by corporations, women, and intellectuals, and is on the other adored by academia for its scathing satire of those very men, and is on the other hand adored by LGBT folks seeing the film’s men as so closeted they’ll fisticuffs their way into physically touching, and is on the other hand adored by anarcho-communists who see Tyler as a Lenin figure demonizing capitalism and classism while propping up his own franchises that uphold those very thrones but with King Tyler-you get the point. Theatrical Dialogue As More Performative.Movies With Natural Dialogue For Verisimilitude.
#EXPOSITION IN FILM HOW TO#
Great Movies Know How To Raise The Stakes.Non-Conventional But Successful Plot Structures.Movie Characters That Are Worth A Study.These Films Execute Extravagant Premises.Because it’s impossible to do something wrong if you don’t know what right looks like, here are 10 screenwriting tips alongside 30 must-see movies that each did it wrong, were adored, and have thereby become right learn where they skewed off the path so that you can skew off theirs. Every song you’ve repeated ten times in a row on a treadmill, every movie you’ve rewatched as you fell asleep, every recipe you’ve burnt because you don’t know why potatoes get soft when boiled but eggs get hard-all of them recreated the rules by breaking the previous rules-doing it wrong. The secret to creativity is making sure that you’re doing it wrong.
