- Acting
- Acting and Story
- Know Your Characters
- Acting Technique
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Know Your Characters
The foundation of good acting is understanding who your character is and what makes it tick. If you truly know your character, you will innately know how and when the character will move and react to the world. Understanding a character can be a long and involved process, and actors use many techniques to accomplish this. The first thing you need to do is answer a few simple questions about the character.
To answer these questions, you can create a simple character description. Many times the writer will do this as part of writing process. If you are animating a one-shot character in a commercial, however, you may have to come up with your own description.
A character description is a paragraph or less, and it simply goes over the basics of the character—usually just the important things, such as age, sex, and personality. Here are two character descriptions for "Karen & Kirby," a series of interstitials that I produced for Warner Bros.
Figure 1 Karen Jones.
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Figure 2 Kirby Derwood.
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