Story Concepts: Terminology

Exposition

Exposition is the information that grounds you in a story: who, what, where, when, and why" is about "giving away what the audience needs, when the audience needs it.

We'll discuss this in more detail in the exposition section.

Train / Narrative Spine

“No film set on a train ever failed”

The quote is an inside joke on the double meaning of the word train. That in story terminology stands as synonym for narrative spine, and how earlier films have often involved trains in some capacity. From top left: Lumiere brothers "Train at La Ciotat", "Night Mail Train" produced by the GPO Film Unit, Dziga vertov "Man with the Movie Camera", "Chronicle of a summer" Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch.

storytelling to move forward you want the audience to be curious about the information you’re giving them.

your goal is to create a film that’s driven by a story, one that will motivate even general viewers to want to know more of those details that thrill you.

Theme

the general underlying subject of a specific story, a recurring idea that often illuminates an aspect of the human condition.

Arc

The arc refers to the way or ways in which the events of the story transform your characters

In an over simplification we could say that if a Character goes from A to B. That's some kind of a journey.

But if they Go from A to C going through B. Where in B they have some kind of transformation so that our character at A and our character at C are different, then you got a story ARC. The difference could as small as change of mind of some view of the world and as big as a character transformation where they could almost be distinct as two different people.

Plot and Character

A character-driven film is one in which the action of the film emerges from the wants and needs of the characters.

In a plot-driven film, the characters are secondary to the events that make up the plot.