How to Describe Characters in a Script

Video Transcript

"STEVE CAVERNO: I'm Steve Caverno on behalf of Expert Village, here today to talk to you about building a character. Now we're going into how to describe a character...describing a character in the script. Okay, let's start off with this. How would you go about describing your character? Well, you're going to have people talk about your character but you're also going to have to have some kind of introduction to who your character is. In that, you probably want to keep it pretty brief. Occupation: What they do maybe, might be incorporated in there. You want age, and maybe a brief description of who they are. So let's say "lazy." So we have a lazy computer salesman who's 30 years old, and that way we develop a type of character. We describe a type of character. In addition to that, we also develop other aspects of character--describing a character...we describe the actions they do, and this is done in the script. This is also done in how they do something. So you could say they move briskly across the stage. In a line of dialog, you can reference how they say it. They can say something ragefully. Now, obviously, you're probably going to have the line there that's emphasized. So this is probably not very important to say, but there are ways where you can influence--you can influence the way a line is said when it's not very specific. And these are some of the ways where you can describe who you're character is and what they are--what they're doing, what--basically give people a general outline on what your character is all about."