•Narration/Unreliable Narrator – Narration is a voiceover in the film that explains or shows events. An unreliable Narrator is someone who tells the story but without any credibility and misleads the viewer.

•Backstory – A story/reason previous to the current events on screen in the main story/plot. These can both be shown or not.

•Flashback/Flashforward – An interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time to a previous event which is usually significant to the current plot now.

•Linear/Non-Linear Narrative –  In a linear film, scenes are arranged in or extending along a straight or nearly straight line of a story. In a non-linear film, scenes aren’t arranged in a linear structure but are shown out of order, such as through flashbacks and etc.

•Ellipsis – When a portion of scene is skipped in a portion of an event, but allowed the reader to interpret and fill in the gaps what happens in the narrative.

•Framing Device – A story away from the main story that goes from the beginning to the end and ties into the main story somehow.

•Cliffhanger/Closed Endings – A plot device that leaves the viewer on the edge of their seat in suspense.

•Macguffin – A plot device that is used to establish the character into motion and drive the story that will often lacking intrinsic importance.

•Foreshadowing – A hint as to what’s to come later on in the narrative.

•Alignment/POV – Alignment is the process of a film putting us into relation into the characters to understand what they feel. POV shows what the world looks like from a characters eyes.

•Causality – The cause-and-effect relationship between events in a film.

•In Media Res – The term used for a films beginning to begin in the middle of the narrative rather than the very start.

•Masterplot/Subplot – Masterplot is the ‘Skeletal’ stories that re-occur again and again. Subplot is the portion of events that occur within a film that are not in relation to the main plot, but eventually feed into it.

•Narrative Hook Plot Twist – a narrative tool used in storytelling to create an unexpected change in the direction or outcome of the plot.

• Deus ex machina – meaning “Machine from god” is a plot device for when a characters overwhelming, unsolvable issue is suddenly resolved.