It's a great literary device to use as a means of exposition without the audience feel like you are pounding them over the head with the info- even though that is exactly what you are doing... Committing a literary crime is one thing... Getting away with it... That's the stuff of great mastermind cinema!
@@v4v819 To be fair, the Captain's Log makes more sense than Character A explaining to Character B in great detail what they both already know. Why make a Captain's Log? So that there's a record of the various voyages and missions. Why dump all that information in the captain's log? Because those details might be important to know at a later point in time. The captain's log doesn't merely exist because the writer or director were in a hurry to dump as much information onto the audience as possible. It exists because it has a logical reason for existing outside of exposition and they've existed ever since captains needed to record information and someone figured out how to make little drawings represent sounds and words.
It’s hard to watch other TV dramas after you see The Sopranos in part because the writers were so good at this kinda thing. They were able to expertly explore extraordinarily deep themes and ideas through mostly under-educated characters with vocabularies that were half profanity. The characters themselves didn’t need to articulately explain what the show was getting at. They were able to show it in the contrast between what they said and did and the broader patterns that emerged from their behavior and emotional ups and downs. Too many shows and movies not only try to explain background information with out-of-place dialogue, they also try to explain the themes and meaning behind the story. That makes it less interpretive and insults the audiences intelligence, in my opinion.
Yeah, but Star Trek is basically "high concept." So you get plots like "alien race is dying from environmental disaster." Sopranos is like a family drama, only there is the mob family drama and the home drama. So it's basically taking ordinary life-- hey, we all have problems at work and with co-workers, and making it extraordinary. That is, Tony's job is being a mafia Don. That's what makes sopranos so great, it's relatable while at the same time, out of the ordinary and heightened. Thr fact is, it's harder to get expository dialog out of the way when there is complicated science stuff involved in a fantastical world. The best way is to just throw the audience unto the world and subtly weave in exposition over time. It's harder, but not impossible and any decent writer can do it. I'm guessing at this point in the TV industry, there are a lot of diversity hired and "political oppointments," to writer positions. The quality has suffered as a result.
I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but I always enjoyed references to stuff way before, my time like “judge Roy Beene” or “Ralph Bunche” that I either looked up or learned to my humor about randomly years later.
@@koolmaaan"We're not talking about those movies for LITERAL CHILDREN like Spiderman, we're talking about the true, mature, CINEMA, REAL, HUMAN films. You know, the type of stuff that can reach out beyond being just a 'movie' into truly being ART. You guessed it, I'm talking about Star Trek."
I think a good alternative to exposition is to use "cinematic shorthand." For example in that Discovery clip, imagine if there's opening text that says "Corpuscula," then we see the characters walking and taking care not to step on a ratty-looking plant, then they simultaneously pull out Starfleet tricorders and look at them with concern for a while, then they continue walking and find some of those eggs and Michael slowly touches one and recoils as nearly all of them disintegrate into dust, Micheal says "are we too late" but the last remaining egg hatches and a creature runs out, and the other one says "they'll hold out for another month at least" and Michael says "but not 89 years." Pretty much all the same information is conveyed, but with virtually no exposition.
I love the Navy SEAL type movies where the team leader explains the mission and the target while they are all stacked on the door getting ready to breach.
I was waiting for him to say it and then i was confused for a second before it hit me lmao, and it gave me a chuckle, proving the point of this whole video
It is interesting that not long ago the movie trailer had a narrator who would essentially tell a story using just a few clips from the film. Meanwhile the film would tell the story without someone literally explaining it. Now, the roles have been reversed and the trailer has not narrator and is doing what the film should be doing.
"IN A WORLD." I miss those trailers. They were cliche, but at the same time effective for explaining the basics of the story and tone, but without giving away too much.
Christ, I felt like I was the only person who thought that first Discovery scene was an abomination. You could literally use it in a writing class to teach what NOT to do...
"Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in." -Ernest Hemingway
The movie Us was creepy as hell until everything stopped and one of the characters explained what was going on. "We are here and we have come to do this." The whole film just fizzled at that point. Writing that directly removes the opportunity for viewers to discuss it later. "What I think was happening was..." You have to let the audience inside the story not keep us at arms length.
It’s not film but I take the opportunity to talk about Tezuka Osamu’s epic manga Buddha at every opportunity. The first volume of Buddha is only tangentially related to the main narrative, but it shows the word Buddha inhabits, the social and political climate, the culture and shows us what type of story the main plot will be. By the time the story starts in Volume 2, Tezuka doesn’t need to explain anything, and the story just begins.
Like many I bet, I ended up saying aloud, Figure It Out at the end. And there was just a black screen. LOL I love it!!! Great video!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And though it's 5 years old, to me, this advice is timeless!! SUBSCRIBED!!!
beautiful piece of content. As a designer i am always trying to simplify and let the user engage with my design solutions. It's the difference between telling a joke and explaining it....
A great example is (spoiler alert) in For a Few Dollars More when in The final duel Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef character) listen The melody from the pocket watch we can figure that the girl of the photo in the watch was a really important person for this character and without the nessecity of telling us, just showing us.
Not that it's the same situation, but I felt similar vibe in Ex Machina, when they talked about sexuality, nature vs. nurture etc. I thought it was oversimplified.
Just compare any episode of The Next Generation and Discovery, it would be the perfect case study of how a TV series can ostensibly have the exact same structure, setting, subject, objective but how the writing is so drastically and horrifically different and jarring. TNG had barely any budget, Discovery has millions upon millions. Anyone interested in film or tv can ultimately conclude that writing is key but I guess no studio exec is ever actually that interested to realise it
That’s what I love about Werner Herzog’s earlier films. He would take this idea even further. There would be scenes that just sit there quietly and almost hypnotize you. There isn’t any message but to be in that moment and......be there.
Or like a David Lynch film. In Dune 84, they got exposition out of the way with a literal narrator at the beginning. A bold choice, but it worked frankly. And then they used scenes of Paul studying Dune on his computer and so on. And then, there was a lot of stuff just left to the imagination! Mystery is a good thing sometimes- probably a lot of the time.
Got a vague memory of Herzog saying in a director's commentary that he was interested in hypnosis and in one film actually attempted to hypnotize the audience. Looks like it worked. Sadly I can't remember which one, so you may as well buy all his stuff on DVD to find out
@@juicedgoose That film was called Heart of Glass. All the actors were supposedly hypnotized. The intro was supposed to hypnotize the audience. Good stuff.
@@landofthesilverpath5823 Duly noted. If you like the dark surrealism of David Lynch I implore you to look up the mechanical art installations of Survival Research Laboratories. Its like Eraserhead to the max.
Yes. I agree they succeed in those movies. Its good dialogue writing of course, but I think its mostly because the one telling the information is from the future/past and has something mindblowing to tell the other character(s). And in some places we are in on the information and enjoy seeing the listening characters minds being blown, and in other places we are as clueless as the characters and get the information for the first time together with the character. They cant believe what they are hearing and naturally asks more, just like we would do. Very good examples you brought up. I should rewatch both. :)
@@oneinchpunched3661 Thanks for your thoughts. I never considered they were both time travel movies! Obviously, very interesting conversations to be had by the characters!
The terminal did an amazing job at telling a very important detail of the plot in a natural feeling way. The airport director uses “simple English” & an apple to explain why victor can’t leave the airport. Victor didn’t know this information and neither did the audience
It's a good device to have a character who doesn't understand, then the other characters can realistically explain the setting. Also why we put a regular Joe Everyman in a lot of fantasy stuff.
I think you hace to get a balance in how you do exposition. If you dont explain nothing the audience get los lost and if you explain too much the audience gets bored, how much you tell and how you tell i think its the key to exposition. And also the story and the context of what is happening is importan to know how an how much tell
I think the points you make are bang on, and you use examples well to back it up, but I'm not sure you said anything in this video that isn't summed up in the phrase 'show don't tell'.
yay4andy He showed show don’t tell instead of just telling you about it. The benefits are way clearer here than repeating a simple sentence would’ve been.
I think the problem is that a certain portion of modern audiences almost require or need to be told how to think and what to think, lacking critical thinking skills that would be required to just figure it out on their own through extrapolation. It's a damn shame but hopefully some people will continue to see the value in creating stories that aren't told to us but rather we experience as if they are unfolding naturally.
Didn't he do that piece of paper folding in half thing too to explain wormholes? I'm so sick of that one. Every single time a wormhole or time travel is brought up, somebody breaks out the ol' piece of paper to fold it in half and stick a pencil through it.
I think I’ve seen so many video essays talk about what show don’t tell is and give examples, but never really talk about how good show don’t tell is achieved, like the actual thought process
I don't know anything about film, but when i write songs and poems, i've found that it's greatly preferable to risk being misunderstood- or make it an inevitability- than to spell something out entirely. It takes the air out of it, and reduces art to math. In my experience, there should be an almost complete lack of thought during the process. In poems, i can suffer maybe 25% logical thinking (this is just a guess), and with songs i find anything above 10% is detrimental to the flow of creativity. I imagine intermittent logical thought is more tolerable in fiction writing, but i have no idea really. Not that you've asked for it, but another thing i've found is that listening to people tell you how to do things makes you think about how they're done, and that aspect is always counterproductive to making art. I can write poems easily and as well as i like, so i've never listened to a word of advice on how to do it. I used to get stuck writing songs though, so i tried some instruction and i got more stuck. I think art has more to do with letting go of than getting a grip on anything. If an athlete's muscles get tied in a knot, he rests. If a brain gets tied in a knot, you take a break and come back to it later and it helps. Nothing fixes it.
I think one neat trick is for people to connect what they see, or comment on it internally (by which I mean diegetically to their companions) in such a way that it communicates to the audience what is going on. For example in the Star Trek scene they could use the idea of an 89 year drought to tell us that one of the main characters is from a place that had a drought by having them comment "I'm no stranger to drought, grew up with it coming around now and then. But eighty-nine years? I don't see how anything here's going to survive that". As for the eggs, just show the eggs and then talk about children. People will figure it out. We've specifically trained ourselves to pick up on connections and associative patterns in the speech of others, it would be silly to not employ that in writing.
this is literally my biggest pet peeve with storytelling. SO MANY films, shows, etc. do this and it’s l a m e. just watched rebel moon and the first 15 minutes has like four cases of it.
So, one of the reasons they do this with newer shows, is because they expect a big part of the audience to be watching the show while watching their phone. Was working as a script assistant on a Netflix show, and that was part of their bible. That’s why you’ll also her completely obvious stuff sometimes, like three soldiers are walking the woods and all of a sudden one of them shoots at a random tree. Right after there could be a line “ wow Mason, you just shot that tree!” I’m being totally serious, and I don’t know if the bigger moron is the show, for writing for goldfish or the viewing audience for having the attention span of a toddler
A good documentary will always lead the viewer to make discoveries for themselves instead of having the narrator simply come out and say it. In fact, really good documentaries don't have narrators at all, just well placed interview snippets and news clips. It is also true that a good joke makes the listener piece the punchline together for themselves as opposed to outright explaining the humor in the situation.
When I watched them as a child, I never understood how hilarious the name of Michael York's character was in Austin powers. Basil exposition. I like to joke with my brother about any exposition as simply "basil".
Love the video so much. Explains show don't tell with some good examples. Curious as to what music is used towards the end in that sopranos clip? Great video:)
I suspect they're telling us because it's cheaper to film it VS showing us the story behind the eggs. It would have been way cooler to see it. But think of the cause VS the 2 characters walking on a virtual production set.
US movies and TV shows have been doing this since forever - it was only 20 years ago that they stopped doing it in 100% of all movies and TV shows (thank you Sopranos). Anime used to be the best genre at letting the stories tell themselves - now you find it everywhere, but the 'explanation' is creeping back into popularity.
Even though the technique that you want to see is more captivating, including the audience into the play is also a technique in a play style called “epic theatre “ which originated by Bertholt Brecht. The writer doesn’t want you to get lost in the play, on the contrary, he/she wants to know you are watching a play and by knowing that, he/she wants you to focus on the message
There's certainly something to that as well. Fyodor Dostoevsky did this type of thing in his storytelling, but it has to be done well- like anything- and not pretentiously or heavy-handedly to be any good. That Star Trek scene is incredibly conspicuous.
I know it's a bit late because the channel seems inactive now, but I thoroughly enjoy your video essays! I'm sad not enough people liked and subscribed to keep you going. I've only just found your channel, and it's already gone lol
Thank you for saying that. It was so heavily censored that I couldn't figure out how it differed from the examples of bad storytelling. I'm also not sure why that example censored all the f-bombs when many of the other examples let them fly unfettered.
this is why horror movies are(were? idk if theyre still making them like they were) popular with teenagers. the big flashing lights & loud noises when the monster shows up? those arent actually there to enhance how scary the thing happening on screen is -- you probably already know that startling someone isn't the same as scaring them & that the former can be detrimental to the latter. the reason they do it is because the intended audience is.... not watching the movie. they're made for people who are on their phones or talking to someone else over the movie, as an indication that the boring part u can ignore is over & its time to pay attention for a bit. its also why the "priest who shows up, has no actual reason they'd know anything about what's going on but infodumps all of the film's backstory & lore and recaps the plot" is basically universal in those movies. when ur doing it bc the target demographic is people who aren't actually that interested in watching films and/or are just in the theater because their friends are there -- sure, okay. but when you start applying those techniques to normal films it reeally starts to come off as not respecting the audience. i do accept on its face that to some extent it broadens the potential reach of the film, but also many times there is an amount of engagement with the film & its world that is lost if the movie itself doesn't expect you to engage with it
I'm not sure if David Lynch meant it to make fun of lazy exposition but there's a hilarious scene in the 3rd season of Twin Peaks which goes something like this: An FBI agent called Wilson has been given a task to find certain 'Douglas Jones' living in Los Angeles. The confused agent goes to see his boss and asks him "There's 43 people called Douglas Jones in the metropolitan L.A.. How are we gonna find the right one?". The boss completely loses his mind and yells at him "WILSON HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I TOLD YOU!? THIS IS WHAT WE DO IN THE FBI!". That's some next level writing genius. 😂 Edit: I remembered the details somewhat incorrectly but the basic idea is exactly the same.
