Separate Scene Storytelling

aka: Deep Immersion Storytelling

Stories being told, read, or testified are often shown as separate scenes from the rest of the work.

This is because while it's often okay to just see someone telling these, or point the camera at a page (and thus this does not run into Show, Don't Tell), doing it for too long would just grind the action to a halt (or even be longer than the work trying to tell the story). Thus, seeing the story being acted out keeps the story entertaining within the work; in this case, it's better to show even though you would be able to get away with telling.

What is being told can vary. Anything from an original story within the show, a Public Domain book, a poem, a or ghost story, a letter, or giving a testimony in court.

While these scenes can involve a separate cast from the main work, they can also involve a Universal-Adaptor Cast.

Characters to whom the story is being told, may do some Leaning on the Fourth Wall as they often understand and talk about elements from the visual scene never actually mentioned by the story-teller. This may be due to bad writing, or done intentionally for laughs.

Sometimes used in documentary-style narrations to avoid Talking Heads.

An Art Shift can be used to make it clear which scene is which.

This is a Super-Trope to:

• Dream Sequence: Someone falls asleep when a story is told and we see their dream interpretation.
• Fantasy Sequence: We're shown it as they're imagining it; it can be hard to tell whether this is the case or not.
• Flashback: The story being shown is something that happened in the past.
• Flash Forward: Similar to a Flashback but directed into the future.
• Framing Device: The story being shown is the main point of the work.
  • Nested Story: The story is composed of several framing devices framing each other.
• "Rashomon"-Style: The same story is shown taking place in several different ways.

Compare Deep-Immersion Gaming, Imagine Spot, Cutaway Gag.

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Examples Not Covered In the Sub Tropes:

Anime and Manga

• Pokémon: The Movie Black/White: The story of the two princes and the dragons is told in-universe with an elaborate pop-up book, but is mostly shown to the viewer as separate scenes.

Comic Books

• Sandcastle: To calm the kids about what comes after death, Amesan tells them a story of a king who was met with a messenger of Death: a half man. The half man told the king that he will die in seven years and a day. Terrified, the king built a castle designed to keep the half man out, but in the process, he also isolated himself from his friends, family and wife out of paranoia. Seven years and a day later, the half man returned and congratulated him on building his tomb. The king told him he built no tomb, only to realize the castle itself was his tomb. As he died, he came to regret spending his last days living alone and not being able to fulfill his dream of climbing a mountain to see real snow. The moral of the story is that death is inevitable and we should cherish every single moment without fear and regret.

Fan Works

• In the essay-fic, Equestria: A History Revealed, most of the history is told by the Conspiracy Theorist narrator, but a few times, most notably in the coverage of the Equestrian Civil War, the Lemony Narrator steps back and the history is told through an In-Universe referenced source, through the eyes of a different pony, in a completely different shift from the comedic tone of the majority of the fic.

Films — Animated

• Some of the earlier Disney Animated Canon films began with a Storybook Opening.
• The Fuma Conspiracy has Goemon reminiscing to the gang about how he met Murasaki while they're on their way to make the Hostage for MacGuffin switch.
• In Turning Red, when Ming explains to Mei about the legend of Sun Yee, the story is presented as traditional Chinese paintings.

Films — Live-Action

• The Princess Bride: When the grandfather starts reading to the child, the action changes to the story. William Goldman boiled this down from a much more elaborate Framing Device in adapting his own novel.
• The film version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows uses this for "The Tale of Three Brothers" section.
• The 1995 film adaptation of Les Miserables was set in France during the Nazi occupation, and the main characters, inspired by acts of heroism from the novel, would play out their own lives as if they were the characters. This meant some sequences of the novel would be dramatically played out on screen (with the actors from the Nazi era playing the characters), some scenes where the action in the 1930s paralelled events and actions from the novel, and other ways as well.
• The Secret of Roan Inish loves this trope, using it on three separate occasions.
  • The first is the story of Sean Michael, an ancestor of Fiona's who was the Sole Survivor when his family's fishing boats were destroyed in a storm.
  • The second is the story of how Fiona's brother, Jamie, was lost: his cradle was washed out to sea as the family was preparing to leave their ancestral island. This one includes a few segments that suggest there's more to the story than the teller realizes.
  • The third and final usage is for the story that explains the origin of the Dark Ones, a phenomenon that causes one child in every generation of the Coneely family to be born with exceptionally dark eyes and hair. Fiona's cousin (a Dark One himself) explains to her that the features come from a Coneely ancestor who was a Selkie, and that being a Dark One is about much more than physical features; they also inherit a deep connection to the sea and the seals.
• The scenes depicting the stories of the witnesses in Surveillance are done in a different film stock and differ from their narration.

Literature

• The Neverending Story played with this. It looked like it was only this at first, and then it turned out the story wasn't just a story.
• Prince Caspian does this with a chapter titled "The dwarf tells of Prince Caspian", when the dwarf is telling the story to the Pevensie children. Just before this chapter, the Lemony Narrator says "I won't include the children's interruptions". A shorter story being told in this way about Prince Rilian happens in The Silver Chair.
• Done often in To Shape a Dragon's Breath to show how various cultures relate to dragons. Anglish Strida tells Anequs the story of the warrior-king Sigur Windtooth conquering dragonkind alone with skilta and force; the proud chaotic lyndwurm destroyed itself with its own breath and crumbled to ash rather than be conquered. Sigur claimed the egg it left behind as a prize in victory and the dragon that hatched from it came out tamed for mankind. Anequs' story to her dragon egg in contrast is of how the mother of the first Nampeshiwe, who had attacked the people of its lands, was drawn in by curiosity in the people's beautiful dancing they had learned by Crow. When told by the people she could not be taught to dance by them due to her wrongdoing, she asked to have her child taught instead as they were still in the egg and had done no wrong. The people agreed and the egg hatched among the people collectively; the dragon approached a young man among them and became the first Nampeshiwe, with its mother leaving the world peacefully with Crow now that her time in it was over.

Live-Action TV

• A Moonlighting episode did this as a framing device to make an Affectionate Parody of The Taming of the Shrew. A kid wanted to watch the show, but he had to read the play for homework instead, and imagined it with the Moonlighting actors playing the roles.
• The Suite Life on Deck: has the cast doing a wackified retelling of Robin Hood — one part story, one part dream that The Ditz is having from having dozed off in class.
• Technically the whole of How I Met Your Mother is this trope, but there are also numerous internal examples, some where the whole episode is a story someone's telling.
• Happy Days: Several examples, including one where Richie's great-uncle tells him about his cousin, who was a crusading DA trying to shut down speakeasies in 1920s Chicago. Richie plays the DA, Mr. C plays the speakeasy owner, Mrs. C plays a Carrie Nation type, Al is the Dumb Muscle for the local gangster (Fonzie), etc.
• A.N.T. Farm: Chyna and Angus do this in Body of EvidANTs while retelling what happened to Olive's toy
• In episode 11 of MythQuest, Blodeuwedd is put on trial. A suspect, the victim, and Blodeuwedd's lawyer all give their testimony as flashbacks.
• Deadtime Stories works this way. The stories themselves are told by a babysitter in the real world, as the show switches between her reading the book and talking to the kids, and the story itself.
• In Rick Siggelkow's two children's series, Shining Time Station and The Noddy Shop, the stories certain characters told would be represented by different British animated series.
• Today's Special: In many episodes, a character would tell a story, with the illustrations appearing onscreen for the viewer. Sometimes, a child actor would play the storyteller.
  • Many stories revolve around a possum named Wanda Willoughby, who lives in a place called Possum Ridge with her family (Mama, Papa, big brother Wendell, and later baby brother Willy). In a couple of episodes, Wanda visits the store.
  • Another recurring series of stories follows the adventures of the Forgetful family.

Machinima

• Invoked in The Strangerhood. Just as Nikki starts explaining her disappearence, Sam interrupts her with, "Excuse me? Could you tell the story in flashback? It's kind of boring just watching you talk."

Newspaper Comics

• Foxtrot does this for stories the characters attempt to write. Many of these attempts fall under Her Code Name Was "Mary Sue", especially the Trope Namer arc.

Theatre

• Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto — when the students in the main story in 1491 are reading the works of Dante Alighieri in class, only Cesare Borgia connects so deeply with the writing that he seems to be stepping into the story. The scenes of Dante's life and writing are shown this way, with Cesare stepping out of the classroom and into those visions.
• Man of La Mancha does this for most of the film, with the characters acting out the tale of Don Quixote in jail and that cutting to seeing them all in the desert/inn/house they were pretending to have.

Western Animation

• Adventures from the Book of Virtues is an example of this being used once or more per episode. Every episode has the animals telling the kids a classic story that accompanies the episode's virtue, whether it is a fairy tale, a folk tale, a tall tale, a fable, or a myth.
• A later season Alvin and the Chipmunks episode did this with Treasure Island (although it was very loose with the plot). There was a blackout, and Dave read them the book while the power was out. The scenes were the chipmunks playing three of the characters, but with the rest of the roles being original people.
• The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Read it and Weep" had Rainbow Dash recuperating from a broken wing, and passing the time by an adventure novel based heavily on Indiana Jones and pulp adventure books. While she read, we saw the scenes of Daring-Do searching the jungle for treasure.
• The X-Men: The Animated Series episode "Jubilee's Fairy Tale Theater" was about Jubilee telling kids a story while they waited to get rescued from a cave-in. It cut to the X-Men in roles in a fantasy adventure.
• Phineas and Ferb: "Excaliferb" is an Homage to The Princess Bride and a spoof of Arthurian Legend. Carl tries to Self-Insert but Major Monogram calls him out for it and won't let him continue unless he reads it properly.
• This occurred in the Garfield and Friends episode Badtime Story with several characters reading a parody of Chicken Little.
  • Parodied in this U.S. Acres Quickie.
  • Happens again in the U.S. Acres episode "The Name Game" where Orson attempts to read "Rumplestiltskin" to Booker and Sheldon. Notably, all the characters who end up getting involved in the storytelling are automatically aware of which parts they play. This leads to Wade (cast as the miller's daughter) declaring he doesn't want to be a girl and getting his wish, and the plot going even more Off the Rails than it already had by the end.
• An episode of Daria was about Daria trying to write a story for class, and her attempts were shown this way, ranging from a Shout-Out to The Graduate, to a Jane Austen spoof, to a future Daria hoped would happen.
• Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja: Randy's summer vacation essay he writes in the first episode is shown flashback-style, as a way to justify Randy's narration^note this is the first and only time Randy is a narrator. As a Freeze-Frame Bonus, the entire essay can briefly be seen written on paper.
• In "Lyle the Kindly Viking", a VeggieTales episode, Archibald Asparagus begins reading the story from a pop-up book before the view zooms in and we see the story fully animated.
• Used on Adventure Time a couple times when the Ice King reads his Gender Bender fanfiction to Finn and Jake.

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