Character depth in a short film
I’m in the midst of rewriting a short drama that is to be shot in about two months. I’m having trouble injecting character depth into it and I don’t know how to fix it. Everytime I try to make it more about the character it gets longer and longer, and it must be around 10 minutes (for university assessment).
– Eva Fitzroy
Character depth may be a false goal. With only ten minutes, you’re not going to be able to make CHINATOWN. Nor should you try.
Rather than cramming in extraneous character information, strive for economy. Is your protagonist a one-armed professional accordion player nervous about meeting his birth father? Fine. Show us that information in the very first scene. If you can’t work in all those details, ask yourself what’s really important: that he plays accordion, that he has one arm, or that he’s nervous about meeting his biological dad.
You may find you have to omit or alter some aspects of the character for sake of getting the plot started. So be it. Think of it like writing poetry: you may have really wanted line two to end with “orange,” but if you’re setting up for a rhyme, that’s just not going to work.
Good short films tend to be about a Character facing a Situation who takes an Action and has an Outcome. Yes, that’s sort of a generic template, but my point is that most successful shorts don’t spend much of their time filling in the details about their characters. What you see is what you get. So make sure those first details we see about the characters are enough to sustain our interest for ten minutes.
Articles
January 13th, 2005 at 9:47 am
It seems as if many student films suffer from the problem of character depth in an odd way. Instead of the shallow/stereotypical characters that the writer of this question is trying to avoid, the pendulum often swings too much in the other direction where we are left with too much of a character study and no action. That is to say, we will never move beyond the fact that the protagonist plays the accordian, he has one arm, and he is nervous about meeting his biological father… The “story” never moves beyond what should only be the first scene or two.
An interesting way to solve this probelm sometimes is to cut out the set-up altogether. It can take a deft touch, but you might want to consider starting your short film in the midst of the action and reveal the depth of your characters through their actions/reactions. If you give all of your characters a full off-screen background and write with that in mind, your audience will catch on very quickly.
January 13th, 2005 at 10:16 am
ACT ONE Chris punches the guy I was going to punch. END OF ACT ONE
I try to avoid the word “hello” when writing. Of course, I’m focused on teleplays right now, so it’s all the more important to cram things in.
But since you’re working on something that is 10 minutes, it’s even shorter. Start in the middle, let the audience figure out the backstory as the scene progresses. They’ll fill in the blanks where you don’t provide information. This isn’t a bad thing, it makes the whole story more relatable.
If you’re thinking this guy had coffee this morning, and that informs the scene, and you tell us he had coffee, then we can only relate if we drink coffee.
If you make him wired, like he had a bunch of caffeine, but don’t tell us he had coffee then:
If we drink coffee we still think he drank coffee.
If we don’t drink coffee, we still don’t lose out on the connection coffee provides, because we can create our own connection (our own reason for him being wired) such as: a) he didn’t eat breakfast, and just like us when we don’t eat breakfast, we’re wired; b) he didn’t sleep last night, just like us; c) he slept too much last night, just like us; d) he did meth this morning, just like us; e) he’s naturally hyper-active, just like us; f) he’s naturally hyper-active just like our friend; etc.
Now there’s a multi-faceted character that may be more relatable. Now there’s mystery, whereas before there was just coffee. Now the whole thing is shorter.
Now the story is interactive, and it doesn’t even have any hyperlinks.
January 13th, 2005 at 3:50 pm
Hey John, are you, or other people here, coming to Sundance next week?
I’m already here, and I would love to meet you in person, as well as other fellow screenwriters, for a chat or a beer.
Well, if you guys plan on coming, drop me a line at rws79((at))matrix.com.br . I don’t have invitations for any nice party but hey… I heard Troma’s opened for the public!
January 13th, 2005 at 3:52 pm
First of all, kudos to you for making a dramatic short and not another Star Wars spoof!
Anyway, I think Chris and Monty makes some very good points. I, personally, find writing effective shorts an even more daunting task than features. One solution I’ve found for this is to think of the dramatic arc of a short subject’s main character in terms of the overall arc of the character as if he/she were written for a feature. In the short version, however, you’re only revealing the apex of this character’s overall transformation. If you can effectively hint at the character’s past and future, you can guide the viewer’s imagination in any direction you like.
January 13th, 2005 at 4:24 pm
Eva, a good way to improve the character depth is to make sure the character’s wardrobe is character-specific, ditto for production design. A choice of car, bedsheets, posters, etc etc can all speak volumes about a character’s state of mind, his beliefs, desires, goals…
January 13th, 2005 at 4:36 pm
No, I’m not headed to Sundance. I’ve actually only gone to the festival once (for GO), but I often participate in the Sundance Writers Lab, which is the week before the festival. This year, unfortunately, I had prior obligations.
Enjoy it Rafael, and write back to say what film or seminar you liked the most.
January 30th, 2005 at 9:19 pm
I think the problem is ‘injecting character depth.’ Character should come from what a character does in the plot - how he reacts to the situations you’ve put him in (which ideally mirror and challenge his character). Character depth shouldn’t be something you slather onto the character. We know practically nothing about Dr. Richard Kimble’s backstory in The Fugitive but we see him saving lives at the risk of his freedom; that tells us what we need to know.