Article Review

In the article “How to Write Great Character Descriptions”, I learned a lot about what the title suggests: writing a great character description. It covers a lot of the elements involved in successful people’s character writings and descriptions. This comes into play with screenwriting as well as in any type of job in which a character needs to be developed. Here are some of the helpful tips. 

It says in that article that what makes a show your favorite show is that people have a favorite character who is a lot like them. It’s possible to get as deep as what the character is doing or what they are wearing. Everything starts with a blank screenplay, the writers have to imagine the characters and gain a mental description before an actor can portray the characters and bring them to life.

This article didn’t have many applications as a filmmaker in the since of actually using a camera in filming things, yet it had a lot of insight in how writing works and successful tips that can be applied to the field. For example, I have liked the idea of writing a screen play before, and now that I know some tips to help me with character development, the overall screenplay would certainly be better with that knowledge being put to use. To set up a good character, you need just enough information to explain their actions without taking away too much for the audience to discover themselves through development during the scenes. They used an example from the movie The Big Lebowski. It says that they introduce The Dude with his diary, setting up his love interest in White Russians for later in the plot and gives an explanation of his demeanor without ruining anything for the audience.

There are also ways to set moods with character descriptions, either being funny, sad, big explosive ones, yet the most successful are ones that aren’t overly elaborate. Having a sad character description can set up situations that happen within the plot and can set a sort of pre-mood to get ready for that sort of scene with that character. Every character introduction can convey a mood.

I personally am very interested in the idea of writing or assisting in a screenplay writing and I know some people who are involved with the sort of thing and would be happy to join in the construction of the thing. I would first like to clarify something first. Namely, what defines a character description as too long or too short? I get that something crazy like a nine minute long character description is too long but for a situation what would be an appropriate time length for character description? I believe that since we watched the Star Wars fan film in class that I could probably ask a professor at a college about time lengths because they probably have quite a lot of experience answering questions such as that when it comes to filmmaking.