If you get a chance, take a look at Georges Seurat’s painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Something you’ll notice in the image is the way that the people in it are all going about their business with little interaction with each other. The characters in the very center of the painting, a woman and her daughter, don’t really feel like they’re meant to draw that much attention.Unlike many other paintings at the time, you almost feel as if no one is meant to be the “protagonist” of the picture.
Your gaze might wander to the woman in black holding an umbrella on the right side of the painting, or to the man lying on his back wearing a sleeveless shirt with a beard and muscles that distinguish him from the posh, upper-middle class dress of the other people. You might even ask questions like: “how did he end up among this crowd? Is he here with the man and woman sitting nearby? How do they know this working man?” Meanwhile, a dog in the bottom right appears to be chased by a monkey. “Who brought a monkey out here? He doesn’t look like some wild animal or zoo fugitive; the posh woman in black doesn’t seem to be worried about him. Is the monkey her pet? Did she bring a monkey out on a Sunday afternoon walk?”
As your eyes dart around the painting, you might see a girl playing in the background, a rowing team in a boat on the water, more than one steamboat in the bay, and a whole lot of characters who seem to have their own lives, goals, and stories that we, the audience, don’t get to know about. We can see the working-class man is smoking a pipe and looking down to the edge of the shore, but we can’t see whatever he sees. The entire scene gives off a feel that this world is lived in, because the people we see in it appear to be living their lives.
I’ve been calling this “the Edge of the Frame” effect. We know what we can see inside the picture’s frame, and we know from the expressions of the characters that there are things going on outside the frame, but we’re not privy to anything else, which means that there are stories going on that we never get to know. It’s not that we should know, either. There are plenty of people in your everyday life with things going on that you never hear about: the cashier at the supermarket and her struggles with paying for school, the quiet kid in your class who secretly has a notebook full of drawings that have never seen the light of day, or the bus driver who’s a war veteran struggling with mundane objects reminding him of his time in the army.
And the funny thing is, the audience doesn’t need to know the background stories of any of these characters; they just need to know that some of them are there. All you need to make the audience believe that the world you’ve created is alive, is to show that people other than your protagonists are going about their own lives. Giving us hints that there are things going on outside the edge of the frame that we can see is enough; we don’t need to know the details.
There is a line you should try not to cross, though. Don’t put so much information regarding what your side characters and bit rolls are doing that they become more interesting than the main characters. Afterall, if their stories are more exciting than your protagonist’s, then why aren’t we following them?
