3 simple, easy-to-use tools to breathe life into your characters.
Last week, in Production Tip #13 – Character Traits, we talked about introducing individual traits to your characters to make them more believable and relatable. This week, we introduce another 3 character development tools: magnification, mirroring and teaching.
- Magnification: This is the blowing out of proportion of one of your character’s traits, making it the most obvious thing about them and pointing to their mental or emotional state – e.g. the Hulk is massive and green because he has an anger issue.
- Mirroring: Exactly what it sounds like: making surrounding characters, sidekicks or even the environment of the film itself mirror your hero’s internal state. Remember pathetic fallacy from your GCSE days? Same thing.
- Teaching: We love action heroes like Indiana Jones not just because they are goodies and they always win, but because they win by learning and outwitting their opponents. Through their learning and experience, we feel like we’ve picked up similar skills and expertise, bringing us closer to them.
Watch our video below to find out more about these useful character development tools:
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Brett Welcher was a student at Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY, USA) where studied Public Relations at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. He is interned at the Raindance Film Festival the summer or 2007 and thoroughly enjoyed his time working with professionals and learning about different aspects of the film industry. In the fall of 2007 Brett returned to the States where he will be finishing his last year in school.
Since then we have lost touch and found this excellent article in the archives. Brett – if you see this, get in touch! We miss you!
