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character care about character?

dlevanchuk

dlevanchuk

Hey guys, I was wondering if you could point me out to the right direction..
What is it about the character that makes the reader to care about him/her?
Is it the "likeness" of the character? The similarity between the main character and the audience??
 
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Another Seattleite!

To answer your question, I'd say the answer is "yes". The more easily we can identify with them, the more ready we are to like them. They can be, in many ways completely different and foreign to us -- say for example, a hitman. But we need to see that deep inside, they are the same -- that what makes them tick is the same as what makes us tick. I'm no screenwriting pro -- that's just what seems right to me.
 
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dlevanchuk said:
What if its a short film (30 mins) long? I assume that's too short to build some type sympathy towards the character..
Click to expand...

Nope, it's not. Every second is precious and should be put to good use. The less time you have, the more conscious you have to be about how to get character across. Instead of having, let's say, three incidents or scenes that reveal character, you only get ONE chance in a short, so it better be the most revealing and the most effective one possible in the context of the story. That means thinking long and hard about it. "Short" isn't necessarily easier; it's often harder due to the necessity of compression.
 
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Actually, I think Cracker pretty much hit it dead on. You can build sympathy in as little as 30 seconds. Reason why we don't see it too often is because people aren't able to pull it off. But, it's definitely possible in my opinion.

Example -- The Eat n Park Christmas Tree Commercial from the 80s or whenever it was made.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eat+n+park+tree+commercial&aq=f

There are so many options in order to make the audience connect or care for the Main Character.

I think a huge starting point is focus on the story you are trying to tell. Take Rudy for example. A kid who has a life long dream to play for the Fighting Irish Football team.

So you got a story you want to tell, right? Okay so let's jump deeper into this character and how we can make the audience connect with him.

-Well, how about everybody always laughed at him and thought he was foolish for thinking a shrimp like himself would ever get the chance to play for the football team.

-So the audience kind of feels sympathy. Why? Well, we all have dreams. (At least I hope we do) So we can already make that connection with this character. His might seem a bit more bold than most of us, but still.

-We jump ahead to the main character in high school. he loses his best friend. his brother takes his girlfriend. This makes the audience feel a bit sorry for the character and makes us want him to succeed that much more because of the outcome of things that are happening in his life.

-We jump ahead to him graduating and starting college. He tries and tries and tries to get into Notre Dame College. Doesn't quite get there. But the second best thing. He's at a college that's right next door. He's so close he can taste it!

and yadda yadda yadda and so forth. It's just a matter of putting the character into situations to where we are rooting from him. It can be a good guy, a bad guy, whatever.

Hope I made sense because I didn't go back and re-read what I wrote.
 
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For a main or lead (Hero usually) you might wish to consider endearing the character, which is to say show them to have attributes the audience likes, cares about and can liken themselves to in order for a vicarious connection to form which essentially says “I like this guy, he is like me.”, so when bad happens to the character we take it personally, when it’s time to root for the Hero, we do.

You can often get the endearing done in a run of “Pet the Dog” when we 1st meet the character.

Pet the dog might be employed via a number of ways, including Image Systems (Posters on the wall in the background in his bedroom, the Zeppelin t-shirt he has on, the drum set in his room, the snowboard propped in the corner. etc) Circumstance or Cleverness (When he swipes his little brother’s toast and strolls out the door.), Reaction to things (The paperboy wings a rolled up newspaper, the Hero catches it without even looking up or missing a beat.) and Interaction (The Hero stops walking and shows some kids the right way to hold a football, then walks on. It’s all usually cliché and stands out when you know to look for it, but power cliché would be like helping an old lady cross the street or literally petting a dog.


(On another separate level- Once you’ve endeared the character, part of that vicarious bond established is about us comparing ourselves to the situation through the character, so for example if something puzzling happens to the character, we (The audience) would likely be puzzled by it ourselves and want to know what the Hero will do. The thing I am getting at is that we (The audience) want to compare the character's actions in a situation to what we ourselves might do in that same situation. This in some cases can be played upon to the comedic contrary, which is to say the character does exactly what many of us wouldn’t do, and that manipulates us into saying like “No, don’t open the closet door!!” Or maybe like “Oh man, he shouldn’t have pissed THAT guy off, he’s huge!” and we watch what happens. Likewise, at other times the Hero might do exactly what many of us would do or wish we could do. This might prompt a “Hell yeah!” reaction from the audience.)

-Thanks-
 
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I can only speak for myself, but I like a character if I can identify with them, Good, Evil, inbetween.

I've watched some movies where I identified so much with the "Villain", I was disappointed when the "good guys" won.
 
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try make them human, maybe the main character is a killer but why has he turned out that way. back story- is he looking for something. I jus finished a 16 page script were my main character is a tad weird, but it turns out he killed somebody by accident. Make it as human as possible
 
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Anything you portray will have been portrayed before, numerous emotions exist, your character will embody feeling, that's inevitable.

Even if your character was completely obsolete, a hush-mouthed minimalist who's never left the confines of his home. There WILL be a connection from somebody, that's human, but whether or not it gains an "Audience", that many will sincerely connect with shelters within matters that are out of our hands. Did the majority of the masses fall in love today, did they lose somebody, did they get fired, or give birth, was there a flash-flood, or a landslide?

We can assume that our work, free-falling, lands somewhere amidst the sentiment we where hoping for, but nothing more.
 
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Well I don't think I can get anywhere near answers as good as these, so I'll just say that whenever I write I try to come up with characters that would be interesting to me on some level, the kind of personalities I could care about or at least be fascinated by. There's not much
 
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It's going to be impossible to come up with a better answer than some of the ones I've read here, so I'll just say that I try to keep things simple. I aim to create characters with personalities I can be made to care about or at least be fascinated by. It's exhausting for me to worry about other perceptions as I'm putting it together. At least at that stage.

I try to get myself hooked and hope for the best as far as anyone else goes. That's probably not the best way to go about it, but it's the one that works for me.
 
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