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What are some tips when designing a character?
Like their background, personality and appearance
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Ricardo’s Answer
Characters are the key to the success of your story. The plot is not enough; the characters are essential. In order to create good characters you need to become a good observer. Talk to different people. Learn how a lawyer talks and behaves compared to a cook at a local restaurant. Listen to them, record them (with their permission... of course) Get your friends together and ask them to allow them to be recorded while you talk about any topic. Later, listen to those recordings and re-discover how they talk. Bad writers have all their characters talk the same way. Most especially if you are looking to write dialogues for movies, the worst thing you can do is have all the characters talk as if they were you.
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Tom’s Answer
What part do they play in your story? Where do they come from? What's their personality like? What's their motivation? One tip is to remember what you've experienced in your life. What have you read? What have you watched? Most of my characters are based on people I've known in my life, since I don't really want to go off of characters that are represented in other TV shows and movies. It's a personal choice, but sometimes it makes the story develop a little easier.
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Mike’s Answer
What's their role in the story? How do they need to make the viewer feel? Should the viewer relate to the character—are they the viewer's way in to the story? Or are they an antagonist or a helper or a friend, or something else—Should the characters make your viewer feel endangered, or safe, or loved? When you create characters, you're really designing for your viewers' emotional response to the story. Start there, and let the world you're creating help inform your choices.
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Jeremy’s Answer
Think about the character's background, their history and try to incorporate that into your story. Developing characters can help to drive your plot and devlop their character arc. Keep that in mind when creating their background as that can help you when writing your story. As for design, taking inspiration from other characters may not be a bad idea so long as you don't infringe on other intellectual properties. Their personalty could help when thinking about a design, or just making them look cool or pretty, it really depends on how you feel about a character. Vice Versa for their personality as their design can reflect that. And again taking inspiration from other works can also help when designing a character's personality.