From the course: Creating a Short Film: 02 Writing

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About exposition and narration

About exposition and narration

- Exposition is the background information that the audience needs to understand the story. Exposition is one of the big challenges of writing any movie, especially a fantasy film, and even more especially a short fantasy film. One of the things that new writers often do is have two characters have a conversation right at the beginning of the story and they just dump all that information on the audience at once. But dispensing just a little bit of the exposition at a time and teasing the audience with that can be a great way to increase audience engagement. The best example of this, in my opinion, in recent memory, is in David Fincher's "Gone Girl" with Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike. Because Fincher only tells you a little of the story at a time, your opinion of the characters and your perception of the story changes wildly. And that journey is super fun because of the brilliant and temperate release of exposition. In "The Assurance", in order to understand the film at all, there had…

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