Good Film Tips - Characters are Paramount

Image courtesy of LouLou - echslectir

This is perhaps one of the most important areas of story creation behind the story itself. Characters are what make a story live and breathe, and quite simply if you have a film full of characters no one is interested in or can relate to, it isn't going to leave a good impression. Having well developed and interesting characters is one of the most important aspects of writing, but many writers often skimp on detail when it comes to them. There are some important things to remember when it comes to incorporating quality characters in your writing, and I have taken the liberty to mention a few things below.

1. Characters should be as important as story
While it is paramount to come up with a really good story that will hold audiences interesting, not having some good characters to back this up can mean trouble. You could have the most interesting story in the world, but with bad characters people aren't going to be half as interested. A lot of writers, myself included, tend to concentrate a lot on the story. The characters become a means to use to make sure everything thats supposed to happen in the story happen. If you're not careful, they become placeholders and tools of the changes that happen in the story without really being their own entity. Sometimes it might be useful to think of the characters as being separate from the story, but yet placed into the story with all their individual reactions and thoughts. Adding importance to the development and back stories of all your main characters can really add a lot of depth to your writing, giving it a lot more intrigue and draw.

2. Characters should be captivating and unique
One of the main purposes of characters is to hold the audiences interest. One of the easiest ways to do this is to make characters captivating. Usually the way to do this is to have researched, well developed personalities for the characters, incorporating very distinctive and recognizable differences between them which makes both their actions and dialogue unique from one another. You don't want all of your characters to act and talk exactly the same, you want to make them as different as humanly possible. It adds variety and spice, and also adds interest to see how different characters react to situations and events differently, or even how they interact with each other.

3. Characters should be unpredictable and original
Another big mistake of writers is tapping into stereotypes too much. This is even encouraged in a lot of books teaching writing skills, as they believe playing into stereotypes makes it easier for audiences to understand characters. Not only does this make characters boring and predictable, it can give audiences the feeling you're treating them as if they were stupid. A clever way to get around this, while still using most of the advantages, is by playing against stereotypes or making characters entirely unpredictable. Alfred Hitchcock was a well known for incorporating this method into his films for both the characters and plots. Playing against stereotypes can in itself be predictable if you use the most common ones, for example the ditzy pretty girl who actually has brains, the harsh and strict teacher who has heart in the end, or the rich miser who is actually very generous. However if done well playing against stereotypes can actually be really effective.

To begin with, utilizing the stereotype in the first place makes the character recognizable to the audiences. For example a nerdy guy that wears glasses (of course) and has a large knowledge of all technical subjects. Audiences can recognize and perhaps even understand such a character, because they have seen this many times before in other films. But to really throw them off and keep them guessing, and to make the character more original, you can add some plays against this predictable stereotype. Maybe he is especially gifted in social interactions, especially with women. This throws off some of the assumptions that typically go with the nerd stereotype. Maybe he is also especially good at some kind of physical activity, like sword fighting or martial arts which might come in particularly handy at one point in the story. If you keep your audience guessing it will keep them engaged in both the story and characters. Playing against stereotypes can make characters much more original and interesting, as well as throwing off audiences assumptions so they won't fall into too much of a relaxed state watching the film.

4. The audience should care about what happens to them
This one is also rather important. You can have the characters as interesting and original as you like, but if they are either intentionally or unintentionally unlikable then people are going to have difficulty caring about what happens to them. Of course I'm not recommending not using anti-hero's or characters that are intentionally pricks, because these ones can be interesting as well. At the very least you must make the characters human, so other humans will care about what happens to them in the story. All of the dramatic points and struggles in your story will loose both their meaning and effect if the audience can't relate to your characters. You have to remember that if audiences don't care what happens to the characters, they're not going to care about the struggles or obstacles you're placing in front of them. On the flipside, however, if they are actively engaged then they will be hanging on every moment you're putting the character into dangerous or tricky situations. If audiences are engaged in the characters then they will be engaged in your story.

A good example of movies that should absolutely having characters you care about in is horror films. If you don't care about the characters, you're not going to care if they slowly get killed off one by one. The Scream trilogy used this really well by having interesting characters that you honestly didn't want getting killed off by the masked killer. If only more horror films would learn how effective this is, instead of creating cardboard cutout characters that audiences couldn't care less about if they happened to get killed along the way.

In conclusion if you have both a good story and good characters, you have the best of both worlds and a great foundation on which to build your film around. Don't let character development fall into the background in story development, good characters are absolutely paramount in making a good film.