The whole idea of a character is the emotional connection between them and the audience. The director of a film, game or even book will have to decide what kind of emotional response they want from a character. For example, the audience will need to feel hatred towards an evil person for there bad doings, if you make the evil character likeable, then the audience will get the wrong impression and therefore might make the narrative more unpredictable and confusing. It is better for the roles of characters to be clear, in case of people of lower intelligence. Unless for example, in “Blade Runner” the director, Ridley Scott manipulates the audience from hating the main bad character Batty to feeling sorry for him at the end by such things as iconography. It takes a lot of skill in cinematography to get away with a manipulation on that scale. So this is why most types of entertainment featuring people are very simple, audiences have been dumbed down by films and games, so anything new and different can be problematic for audiences.
As a human, we read into people’s body language sometimes even more than conversation. This is why it is important for characters to be easily read, confusion between the characters and audience may make the narrative not very enjoyable and pleasing on the eye. Audiences like to feel comfortable while watching a film, passive viewing has become more and more appropriate for audiences in recent years, as having to work to understand a character means too much effort, as these sort of entertainment is mainly for enjoyment purposes, people don’t want to work to understand the characters and narrative.
The audience will project there alter ego onto a protagonist in a game or film, meaning that they will see themselves in that kind of role. This means the audience will sympathise and recognise the protagonist as the good role. This is why I, and the audience will see them as good and wish them well. Same can be said for the antagonist, we recognise the bad behaviour through how the character acts and therefore we feel negative emotions towards.
As a character, it is important for all aspects, such as script, acting and appearance to be of a good quality and easily understood. The script will have to suit the characters personality otherwise the audience will once again get the wrong impression. If for example, an antagonist is being really polite and kind, you are going to get confused as to what his specific role is.
The acting of a character is also important so we can read the correct body language. If all the acting is very poor it may be misunderstood and the audience may not be able to properly relate.
The appearance will also need to be in the same kind of style as other features of the character. These three features influence the way the audience reacts and feels towards a character, if one of these is done poorly, then it will affect the overall performance the character gives off. This is why it is important to understand the roles of a character and give them background as to why they are like that rather than just making a character like that because they think it looks good.
The kind of stories that I love are mostly one where there is some sort of zombie apocalypse. The first reason being that I am totally obsessed by zombies. The second reason is that I like to see how the actors (the characters) react to this sort of apocalypse. In many zombie films, it is shown that the humans are more scary than the zombies. Zombies just follow there basic natural instinct to find food and eat. In the films, the humans tend to push others out of the group and basically show off how horrible they are. In most films zombies are shown as more human than the actual humans. This is because the zombies are killing for food, to keep themselves alive, which shows humanity in them. The humans sometimes end up killing another human because he or she doesn’t like them. For example, in “28 Days Later” cinematography is used to show how mindless humans are, by repeativly using camera angles where the top of the human actors head is cut off, this shows how thoughtless people can be towards each other. Disaster brings out the real personality in a human.
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