Character Development

1. Who am I? (character-search for character’s life prior to play’s/scene’s beginning)

2. Where am I? (environment: location, conditions)

3. What surrounds me? (persons, objects, colour and texture)

4. What time is it? (hour, minute, date, year, century, era)

5. What are the given circumstances? (those events, facts, and conditions occurring before or during the play/scene that affect the character and /or action)

6. What is my relationship? (to all of the above and to other characters-solid or shifting?)

7. What do I want? (Objectives or Intention –includes the overall character objectives as well as more immediate beatto-beat intentions).

8. What’s in my way? (Obstacle) 9. What do I do to get what I want? (ACTION – VERBS; physical, verbal, psychological)

You can’t just be a great performer to succeed in acting. You have to be an expert at living life as another person. You have to convince people that you’re someone else entirely. And to do that, you need to know how to have another person’s emotions, dreams, triggers and habits. Can you do that?

While it might seem complex, it’s actually quite simple when you know the foundations and get support. Like all skills, it’s one that needs to be challenged and exercised to become stronger and second nature to you

So let’s talk about the skill of quickly and convincingly getting into character, shall we?

To excel at character acting, you have to understand the role you’re playing almost more than you understand yourself. You’ve got to know their habits, fears, dreams and wounds. This is how you not only develop the character, but become them. The actor is expected to literally feel the same emotional impulses as the character would in circumstances described in the script. The classical approach, in contrast, focuses on externalising these processes of character development by developing a certain set of skills

Here are the main points and processes:

Real Life Observation – In developing the character, the actor must first spend time observing how the character’s real life counterparts move and operate in the world. Where do they go? Who do they interact with? How do they interact?

Character Motivation – The actor needs to ask a series of questions to determine motivation: how would the character react in the given situation? What situations would need to occur to motivate the character in a particular direction? What events would trigger particular emotions within the character.

Emotional Memory – Key to the method acting approach is the shift away from the actor’s portrayal of emotion toward the actor’s internalisation of that emotion. The actor is expected to feel the emotion rather than simply pantomime it.

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