Character Design Basics

This is the cast of "Seinfeld."...now what's weirder, the fact that I just reduced the four main characters of a TV show down to basic shapes, or the fact that even if you've only seen commercials for the show, you know which character is which shape? This is not a coincidence. While I don't know this for a fact, it's very credible that the creators and casting directors put a lot of thought into the basic shape of the cast members.

This was all pointed out to me a few years ago in art school. The basics of character design rely on the human necessity to find visual distinction between people. At the most basic level, you have distinctions of race, gender, age, and physical disposition. I have been thinking about this recently because my roommate and I have been watching the show "Community." The cast of characters in it has a lot of visual variety in these basic levels.

Quick note before I go on: this has NOTHING to do with racist or sexist motives. It is an inherent quality in the human psyche to distinct people by gender and race, as well as age and physical disposition. On a subconscious level, when the mind is trying to recall a person, these factors simply come up first.

In "Community" the two people that share the closest resemblances on these levels are the two young girls Britta (foreground) and Annie (middle row). They're both young, white, physically fit girls. But Britta is a blonde, and Annie is a brunette: one of the primary distinctions that guys make when comparing girls. Variety is obviously not on just the basic levels, but extends into clothing style, hair, height, and all the other factors that make no two people exactly alike.

Variety is necessary in character design because an audience has to instantly 1) connect faces with names with personalities and 2) find someone in the cast that they can relate to. Variety can be something that is a part of the story, too. The original Star Wars trilogy emphasized the variety of species and character background in the Rebellion with the uniformity of the Empire. Some stories have an agenda of political correctness, which is fine, but good luck sneaking it past the audience without them catching on very early.

Sometimes, though, variety in character design isn't completely possible. With as much variety of characters in "Lord of the Rings," when I saw the first movie for the first time (having not read the books) I was so blown away by everything the film was showing me, that I sometimes got Aragorn and Boromir confused. Viggo Mortensen and Sean Bean were both perfectly cast, and looked exactly as Tolkien described their characters, and their similarities are a part of the story, but I just needed to see the film again to understand how different they both were. In other cases, factors like location and time period don't allow for visual variety. There's no two ways about it: a World War II story about US soldiers is going to have a bunch of white, physically fit, guys who are all basically the same age, and wearing the exact same clothing. The TV series "Band of Brothers" had this tremendous hurdle to deal with on a large level, and so lots of focus was put into the distinctions of personality between characters.