Hi all, another thread that I hope will be beneficial to others.
How do you inject heart and likeability into your characters?
This partly builds on the "plot first, theme second thread" where ATB made good points about heart and partly because there are so many films out there where the criticisms are that the movie/characters didn't have heart. The advice "make your characters likeable" is much like "build rapport with your customer" in that it sounds obvious but it's hard to pin down how to do it.
And this has become particularly important to me as I've veered off the action and horror track into rom com territory so whilst I plod along, I figured now would be a good time to bring it up.
So how? The obvious route is to have the character do something nice: rescue a cat, help an old lady, run a charity but that alone doesn't constitute heart and many films use these tropes but still fall flat.
Is it as simple as have your character save the cat, to make us like them, and then run them through the grinder, where we see them rally - like Rocky - and thus see they have heart? Then again, Up didn't do this yet no one can deny the film, and Carl had much heart and likeability - long before he even got chased by Muntz and his dogs.
Thoughts?
How do you inject heart and likeability into your characters?
This partly builds on the "plot first, theme second thread" where ATB made good points about heart and partly because there are so many films out there where the criticisms are that the movie/characters didn't have heart. The advice "make your characters likeable" is much like "build rapport with your customer" in that it sounds obvious but it's hard to pin down how to do it.
And this has become particularly important to me as I've veered off the action and horror track into rom com territory so whilst I plod along, I figured now would be a good time to bring it up.
So how? The obvious route is to have the character do something nice: rescue a cat, help an old lady, run a charity but that alone doesn't constitute heart and many films use these tropes but still fall flat.
Is it as simple as have your character save the cat, to make us like them, and then run them through the grinder, where we see them rally - like Rocky - and thus see they have heart? Then again, Up didn't do this yet no one can deny the film, and Carl had much heart and likeability - long before he even got chased by Muntz and his dogs.
Thoughts?
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