DRAM

60: Fundamentals of Acting II

Character Analysis Assignments
Character Analysis III
Psychology



1. What is your character’s morality?

2. How is your character’s sex life?

3. What are your character’s personal ambitions? Frustrations? Proudest moments? Chief
disappointments?

4. What is your character’s temperament? Easygoing, hot-tempered, optimistic, or
depressed? What are your character’s complexes? Obsessions? Inhibitions?
Superstitions? Phobias?

5. What are you character’s special abilities or talents? Describe your character’s sense of
humor and other particular qualities such as: imagination, judgment, taste, poise, and
habits (good and bad).

6. What is your character’s level of intelligence? Is your character “book smart”, “street
smart” or not smart at all?

7. What are your character’s most important memories, dreams, daydreams, fears,
desires, and passions?





The first thing we notice in a creative act is that it is an encounter. Artists encounter the
landscape they propose to paint—they look at it, observe it from this angle and that. They are
as we say absorbed in it. Or, in the case of abstract painters, the encounter may be led off by
the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas. The paint, the
canvas, and the materials then become a secondary part of this encounter; they are the
language of it, the media, as we rightly put it. Or scientists confront their experiment, their
laboratory task, in a similar situation of encounter.

The encounter may or may not involve voluntary effort—that is, “will power.” The essential
point is not the presence or absence of voluntary effort, but the degree of absorption, the
degree of intensity; there must be a specific quality of engagement.

--Rollo May
The Courage to Create