The phrase 'background action' is correct and usable in written English.
You can use this phrase when referring to minimal or subtle activities or events occurring in the background without drawing attention or detracting from the main focus. For example, "Although the primary goal of the meeting was to discuss the budget, there was some background action concerning personnel policy."
In "Arjuna's Dilemma," the sacred text is everything: foreground, background, action, touchstone.
Too many arias and ensembles are performed before self-consciously symbolic and often pointless background action from a roster of invented silent characters.
Although the patients were present in Holby City, they often seemed to be only background action while the viewer focused on the romantic involvements of doctors and nurses, their ethical and moral dilemmas, and staff quietly battling their own illnesses.
With his use of background action and off-screen space, Walsh constantly suggests that the drama in the foreground is only a fraction of a much wider world in continuous tumult, a world that extends beyond the boundaries of the story, of which it may not even be aware.
Soderbergh uses his phone as if it were a virtual 3-D camera—holditg it low to let otherwise innocuous objects loom ominously in the foreground while leaving the background action busy and deceptively distant and betrays a similar exuberance in the editing room.
While Childish Gambino is surely the star – playing the role some have suggested is America itself – viewed in context of the background action, the video is dizzying, hypnotic treatise on racism, gun violence, joy, spirituality, hip-hop and entertainment in the United States.
Driving and walking, however, do seem to be natural "background" actions.
That may include smoke and fog or background actions like the occasional bird flying by or palm trees swaying in a make-believe tropical breeze.
Films such as The Matrix (1999), Star Wars: Episode One (1999), and Gladiator (2000), incorporate backgrounds, action sequences, and even major characters conceived by illustrators and brought to life by technology.
Against Mr. Alessandrini's intentionally minimal background, the action took on the quality of a stage play: Declamatory vividness was as important as beauty of tone.
In Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), significant characters are repeatedly framed in the right or left foreground while in the background an action takes place that disturbs that character or that that character somehow controls.
