All images from Inspired 3D Short Film Production by Jeremy Cantor and Pepe Valencia, series edited by Kyle Clark and Michael Ford. Reprinted with permission.

Be sure to check out Part 1 of this multi-part series.

Character Development
Before, during or after the creation of your story you’ll need to spend some time deciding on the specifics of your protagonists, antagonists, supporting players and background extras with regard to their physical attributes, personalities, motivations, relationships and arcs. Demonstrating these characteristics and their progressions to your audience is known as character development.

Character Resumes
Before you can successfully describe a character to an audience, it is often helpful to create a resume or biography for him that will indicate physical, historical, social and psychological specifics. It is generally a good idea for you to know your characters intimately, even if you won’t have the time to deeply develop them within the timeframe of your short film. You can easily assemble a character resume by applying the method-acting technique and asking yourself a few questions about the character. A good place to start is by asking, “What is his dominant character trait?” Everybody has one. Perhaps it’s shyness, greed, generosity, musical talent, stubbornness, pacifism, obesity, arrogance, fashion sense or schizophrenia. Selecting a single dominant trait will help guide your character’s design and behavior. Other questions will help to round out the details:

How does he see himself? Is it different than the way his friends or enemies see him?

What are his favorite song, color and ice cream flavor?

All images from Inspired 3D Short Film Production by Jeremy Cantor and Pepe Valencia, series edited by Kyle Clark and Michael Ford. Reprinted with permission.

While it is certainly not necessary to complicate your task by answering all of these questions, if you wrap your own head around the most significant attributes, history and motivations of your character, it will be that much easier to deliver this information to your viewers. And the more you know about your characters, the easier time you’ll have appending scenes to your story or someday producing a sequel.

When describing a character, use specifics such as Persian rather than cat or crotchety instead of old. If your film is going to have multiple characters, indicate their relationships in their resumes. Also take some time to think about the specifics of your characters’ environments. Do they exist in a tranquil forest or a dangerous battlefield? An isolated desert island or a heavily populated big city? A housing project near the train station or a penthouse apartment in Beverly Hills? Where a character lives or operates can significantly influence the specifics of his design and personality.

Because you will ultimately be delivering a film, which is primarily a visual medium, a sketch or a render with a few typed or handwritten notes can make an excellent alternative to a formal resume made up of descriptive text (see Figure 16).