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Continuing with our brief exploration of all the features available through the Dramatica Desktop, in this lesson we'll take a look at Dramatica's Character functions.
The Characters tile leads to a whole collection of tools for building the structural and personal traits and attributes of your characters. Here you'll find all the traditional elements of character, such as names, genders, personality types, physical characteristics, and histories. But you'll also have some truly revolutionary tools at your finger tips that give you detailed control of each character's dramatic functions, and can even predict essential multi-layered interactions among your characters that ought to be explored.
Play Video on the Characters feature
Holistic Stories, Holistic Dramatica
Characters, Plot, Theme, and Genre do not stand alone as separate parts of a story. Rather, they are four different kinds of Dramatic Force that each influence the others. So, every time a character does something, it has an element of plot to it. Whenever a moral point is made in the theme, it contributes to the genre.
Following this attribute of story structure, you won't find everything about characters under the character tile. In fact, there are software features that influence aspects of your characters throughout the program.
Since all of these features are tied into the central Story Engine, dramatic choices you make in one area that contribute to your characters will be "felt" in all other areas pertaining to characters.
Still, the Characters Tile brings together many of the software features that most directly determine the nature and personalities of your characters.
When you click on the Characters Tile, it will open a new window with a column of additional tiles running down the left side of the screen. Each one of these tiles opens a different sub-section of Dramatica that deals with an aspect of character development.
The first of these tiles is labeled Create Character. This feature opens what is essentially a blank character file, which is a window that has spaces for all the information you might want to include when developing a character.
Some of the spaces have multiple choice selections, and other are for you to fill in with your own material. When you create a character, a place-holder icon appears in the right side of the Build Characters window. So, here you will find a complete list of your entire cast.
We'll go into complete detail on creating characters later in the course. For now, our purpose is just to introduce what lies behind the Create Characters Tile.
The Build Characters feature helps you assign dramatic traits such as "Faith" and "Logic" to each individual character, once it has been created. It also help you develop multi-layered relationships and interactions among your characters, so that they might conflict in regard to certain issues, but partner-up on others.
You can remove characters from your cast simply by highlighting a character's icon in the right side of the screen and then clicking on the Delete Character tile.
If you highlight a character and click on the Character Info Tile it will open that character's file where you can find all the information you've entered, and also make changes and add new material. (You can also open a character's info window simply by double-clicking on the character's icon.)
The Main / Impact Tile deals with two special characters from the Dramatica theory. The Main Character is the one who grapples with the moral issue of the story, and represents the reader or audience. Often this is the same character as the Protagonist, but since Protagonist is a function and Main Character is a point of view, the two attributes don't have to be assigned to the same character. The Impact character is the one who has the opposing moral view, and who is most influential in pressuring the Main Character to change.
In this area of Build Characters you can assign these two attributes to any of your cast of characters, and can determine some fundamental qualities of each. We'll fully explore both the functions of and theory behind these features later in the course.
Dramatica comes with over 500 character icons to help individualize each character. Essentially, these are just thumbnail facial pictures or drawings of different kinds of people, animals, and items that might be characters.
You can also import your own pictures to Dramatica, and might even choose to assign the faces of well-known actors to your characters to help yourself and others get quickly in touch with their personalities.
Copyright 2003 Melanie Anne Phillips
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