From the course: Working with Actors & Non-Actors in Video Production

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Breaking down your characters

Breaking down your characters

- One of the most useful things you can do for your talent in advance is to break down their characters in detail, and share that information with them. This will allow them to incorporate your direction while researching and preparing their roles. To break down your characters, you're going to need to write a detailed background for each one. If you look on the right, this is an example of a role-playing game character sheet, where you break down each personality trait a character has and assign it a number. You want to do something similar to this when you break down your characters, but maybe not with the sheet itself. You want to include information on your character's past, their upbringing, individual quirks of their personality, any details that you can think of that will enhance their character on the screen. One important question to answer is, what do other characters in the story think of your character? That's definitely going to influence how they fit into the overall…

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