Character, and emotion

Alright everyone this is one my favorite subjects when creating a short, movie or what ever it is that you are doing. The character is the most important part of the movie, they make the audience have emotions, whatever they feel the audience feels, if their heart breaks then audience heart brakes. It is not only important to make the audience laugh but as well as make them cry, or feel depressed or sad. Now i know that the character does not just do that themselves, the envirnment and lighting and all that has to do alot with it, but that is an entirly different monster all in itself. The character though is probably about 70-80% of why you are feeling sad for them. You need to find your target audience that you want to make feel all of these emotions that you are trying to portray. My personal Favorite audience is family, its kids and grownups mixed into one. So you get to do many things in your film, but that doesnt mean its the easy way out, you still need to find things that both will understand and relate to.

My most favorite scene that portrays emotion of all time in any movie that I have ever scene is in Toy Story 3. This movie was for all adiences but mostly for a family setting. Pixar really captured everyones emotion when the toys were about to be destroyed, why, because they made the audience love them, and care about them, the toys didnt want to be destroyed and the viewers didnt want them to be destoyed either. I will be the first one to admit that when i watched it for the first time i was balling like a baby.
Now I know that they had three movies to make you really care about what happened to these lovely toys, but that is part of the challenge, making your audience care in the amount of and hour or two. Even in the first Toy Story i cared a lot about what happened to the toys. When Andy lost his toys i wanted him to get them back.

But enough on how the emotion is suppose to be portraid for now and back to more on how you can understand the different moods of your characters, for animators or yourself. Before you get going on making a fanomanal movie with said character, plan out how they look when they feel their certain emotions, this is called a character spreadsheet or character layout, call it what you will it is for the characters emotions.And dont be affriad to really push the emotion of the character, the audience will really play into that and really feel it.

Take Ben here for example, there are 7 diffferent emotions here on how he feels throughout the movie. Doing this will help you not get confused about how the characters moods are portraid, the more you confuse your audience the crappier and less funny your film is going to be.
So remember always keep your charcters emotions clear and dont switch things up when they feel the same thing in differnt parts of the film. Here are some more of the spreadsheet examples.

Below are some of my own simple sketches of a character worksheet/ spreadsheet.