How to Create Characters for a Movie Script

Video Transcript

"Okay, so using our formula we'll now discuss what happens next in Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3. Under Act 1 here's what I want you to write. The next thing you are going to do once you decide what your concept is going to be, is I want you to introduce your main characters. This is all what is happening in Act 1. In Act 2, I want you to develop these people and tell us more about them, show us some of the challenges they're going to face. And, basically build them up. And, in Act 3 I want you to resolve the character's problems that happened in Act 1 and Act 2. I want you to resolve them, to bring them to a completion as people and as living beings. You don't want to make them one dimensional, you want to make them have a life. Challenges they have to face so that the person in Act 1 hopefully will not be the exact same person in Act 2. They learned their life lesson or they developed some skill or whatever it is you are trying to accomplish with your character. The other thing is, you never want to have more than 6 characters as your main characters. You want to have 6 to 4, 4 being the best. Why? Because you have to introduce them all. You have to develop problems that they resolve for them all later in Act 3. So, the more main characters you have the more difficult that becomes. You want to really define these people here in Act 2, their strengths, their weaknesses, what their conflicts are, how they do handle them or how they don't handle them. And in Act 3, as I said, you're going to find a way to resolve whatever problems your characters faced. So you see why writing too many characters could become a nightmare. "