A new pair of eyes to look through

When I do a project I often first create a character. I don’t exactly know what this character will look like, how he or she will think, or do, or believe, but once the character exists, all of those things become evident.

It’s as though I need a new pair of eyes to look through, and once I am seeing things through those eyes, I can see what they see.

I wonder how wide-spread is this way of working. Do many storytellers, songwriters, playwrights, animators, novelists, try first to find their characters, and then let everything flow out from those new identities?

For me it seems so much easier to work this way. There are so many important questions, insights, ways of seeing, that to me would be completely mysterious. But to the character I’ve created — once he or she has been found — everything is clear.

2 thoughts on “A new pair of eyes to look through”

  1. Completely agree. Absolutely the best method as far as I am concerned. For the user experience work, it becomes difficult to do my job if I can’t look beyond my own prejudices (or inversely, my preexisting knowledge of the system in question).

    For CG, I’m very music oriented and I love laying out my animations to the soundtrack. To help me break out of my own box, I try to think of the kind of music I might not be a major fan of, but a “character” might be, and then I try to understand their love of that type of music. It helps me on a personal level too, to appreciate new kinds of music.

    Since the work I do is almost always centered around natural environments, I end up making characters out of iconic trees or a mountain or a meadow. Not a straightforward anthropomorphization, but since the goal is to achieve realistic visuals of an environment I may not be familiar with, I have to experience what it experiences. After all, even non-sentient elements are still subject to external events, cause and effect. Once the new character is found, as you put it, then it starts changing my flow of the scene and introduce things that I might not have thought of if I had planned it all.

    In many ways I find it far more interesting thinking like a rock than thinking like a human. Rock faces have far more character. Except Freeman Dyson – his face can take on Mt Everest. I’d love to see through his eyes, come to think of it.

    Ramblings.End();

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