Daily Log Blog 5/9

Today in class we started by introducing the topic of exposition.  We said that exposition is the part of the movie, in the beginning, that tells the audience about the world and gives context about the world around the characters.  Sometimes movies need a lot of exposition in order to explain what is happening, like the Lord of The Rings or Star Wars, because their universe is much different than the world we know today, while other movies, like Get Out, don’t need as much exposition because the audience is already familiar with their world, because it is our world.  We then watched a clip on how to effectively create or craft the exposition without having one character do one long mono-log about the world that is around them.  The classic example is through a banner or text that appears just before the movie to give context, like in Star Wars.  Other more complicated ways are through visuals, like props, costumes, or the setting, and dialog, how characters interact with other characters, or trying to sneak context into a conversation. 
In the below scene from Jumanji 2  you can see how visuals and dialog are used to give context about the characters, specifically their personalities.  Through the use of costumes the film helps characterize some of the characters, like Bethany and Fridge.  The audience can see from the way Bethany wears her gym clothes that she is one of the “pretty” and “popular” girls and embodies their personality traits.  The audience can also see by the fact that Fridge is wearing a sports jersey and he is big and muscular that he is a jock.  All this information is conveyed very quickly and efficiently to the audience so that they can get a lot of context in a relatively short period of time, thus leaving more time in the film for the main conflict.  The film also uses dialog to give context on the personalities of the characters.  From the conversation between Martha and the gym teacher we find out that Martha is a huge nerd and is very serious about her academics.  All of these tacticas help give context and advance the exposition while also not interrupting the flow of the film.

Once we finished our discussion on exposition we continued to work on our final narratives.