CHARACTER PERSONALITYItanile

CHARACTER PERSONALITY (2)

We get from our previous post that Personality is the sum total of the way an individual feels or thinks towards a particular subject. We also trail the path that we can reveal the personality of our characters via their interests. Which is where we’ll begin now.

CHARACTER INTERESTS

How does your character interest reveal the personality of your character?

Interests are sure ways you can tell us more about your character so let’s revisit what we believe interests mean to us.

Interest means a sense of concern with and curiosity about someone or something. For the course of this study, we’ll stick with subject instead of saying someone or something.

We would tackle Character Interests under:

Character Interest and Leads

YOUR CHARACTER AND THE SUBJECT

What is the subject or object that your character is interested in? How can this help us access your character’s personality?

More often, what your character is interested in and the manner with which you show it would give us ideas of the personality of the character.

CHARACTER INTERESTS AND LEADS

Let’s say MUSIC.

If your character’s interest is in music, Which kind of music?

Jazz, Hip-Hop, Classicals? Etc

A more mature character would crave for classical.

In the movie, August Rush we could see that even though the main characters craved music, the different kinds of music they crave for tell us a little about their personality. While the main character’s love for playing the violin stems from his personality that was formed by a fusion of both his parent’s musical passions, it tells us more about his reserved and deep seated creative person.

CHARACTER MEMORIES

What memories do your character hold dear? Memories of a character gives us leads to what shaped the personality of your character. When employing character memories, you must answer the following questions:

How does this memory impact on the character’s personality?

A good movie that plays around character memories is The American Movie, The giver. The main Character Personality Jonas, is being shaped by the memories he receives. Through his exposure to positive memories, He acquires wisdom and compassion. His character Personality hence reads off as one who is Thoughtful, Careful and Empathetic.

Character memories may give us more insights into character’s action, hence understanding the personality of the character too. For example, a shy, scared, anxious and closed off person would often have memories of a strict and punitive childhood.

Even in the movie, Black panther, the wicked Villain experienced a childhood of abandonment and rejection hence his personality is scarred with hatred, Aggression, Greed, Unjust Control and Oppression.

CHARACTER DECLARATION

This is among the simplest approach and it is still effective. Instead of letting us decipher the personality of your character via their clothing, relationships, interests and memories, you can just have your characters make bold or subtler declarations of who they are. Maybe their identity and how they want us to see them. We can get to know who your character is from just what they say about themselves or what other people say about them.

In Moana, her bold declaration,” I am a daughter of A Village Chief…” was effective in making us not to second guess who she really was.

With this, we’ve come to the end of our lesson of revealing character personality.

There are various other ways Character personality can be revealed aside from the ones we’ve analysed.

Do you mind sharing with us?

Leave us a comment.

Character Design.