Audio Transcript Auto-generated
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everybody wants to know how to create exciting characters.
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You will have seen mesmerizing characters on screen and not
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really analyzed at the time, why they were so compelling.
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So I'm thinking of people like Tony soprano walter white
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had a hall bath and girls, there are many kinds
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of people in the world and so there are many
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kinds of characters that can work well within our stories.
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One of the ways to get started, we're thinking about
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character and creating your own characters is to think about
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the social, economic and the physical attributes of your character.
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So let's have a think about social in the first
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instance. Who are these people in the world?
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How do they operate?
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Do they exist within a family context?
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What is their relationship like within that family?
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Are they married?
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Are they divorced?
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Do they have kids?
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Are they a pet owner?
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When you start to drill down into character, you're looking
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to define people in lots of different ways.
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And actually when you start to assert different kinds of
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relationships in your character's life, it will bring about story
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every time you peel back a layer of the carrots,
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every time you scrutinize why that person is quiet or
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upset or jaded by life, you can probably find a
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way back to the relationships in their life, is having
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defined that trait in them somehow along the way, and
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that's when we start creating Real three dimensional character.
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The second area that I talked about was the economic
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area, so this is really about how characters exist in
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the world and it can be as basic as do
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they have money?
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Where do they live?
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How do they live?
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Do they have a career?
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Have they changed careers for a certain reason?
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How much money do they have a big house or
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small? Do they have aspirations in terms of ascending up
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the economic scale, when you think about how your character
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lives, where they live and what defines them, about how
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they live?
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You again plunder various areas of potential storytelling plot devices.
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The final area that I suggest you focus on for
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your characters is physical.
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And again, we all look at people in the first
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instance and make assumptions or judgments about them, they will
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make us are very aware of this, screenwriters tend to
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keep their stage directions and character descriptions to a fairly
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succinct level, but that doesn't stop you within the story
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and within your character's dialogue or relationships with defining more
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and more about how your character looks, sounds and operates
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in the world.
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So here we can define physical characteristics that may again,
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at as a catalyst for how they relate to the
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world and how they relate to people within it.
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Are they good looking?
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Do they have relationships etcetera based on their looks?
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Do they live in a world that is uh, defines
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their looks is very important.
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I'm thinking of situations in films where characters are wanting
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to be something that they're not, you might go back
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to a classic like Pretty Woman for example, where Vivian
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transforms completely throughout the film in terms of how she
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looks and how she operates around how she looks.
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I mean, your character could have something that is deemed
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a physical lack of ability and that could also define
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their relationship with the world.
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Um, there are many, many elements of their physicality that
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can be important to your story, whether it's a scene
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attribute or an unseen attribute.
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If you write a list of your character's physical attributes,
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I am again certain you will find story within those
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that list.