I'm still working on revising my horror script, "The Shadows," and my biggest challenge right now is developing my side characters and giving them enough to do to support the main protagonist's journey while experiencing their own journeys and personal growth. However, I don't want to make my script too long, so I am tempted to erase or merge certain characters. I'd rather not eliminate any characters, so if anyone has any advice to help me through this dilemma, I'd be very grateful to hear your thoughts.
Screenwriting : Developing Side-Characters by Anthony John Orlando
Competition Reader at Austin Film Festival ♦ Screenwriter, Author, Videographer, Actor, Cinematographer, Director, Editor, Photographer (Still)
1 year ago
Developing Side-Characters
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You set the cost to be between $1M and #5M on your logline for that film. Someone will have to come up with the money to hire the actors so the fewer you have the better. So if a character doesn’t move the story forward eliminate or merge some of them. It may make it easier to do if you pretend the money is coming out of your end.
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What Dan said. I can't remember if I heard this in school or some interview, but I'm going to paraphrase here, "When you're working on a story and are done with it, ask yourself, am I willing to invest X amount of my own money to get this thing made? If you can't answer that confidently or if the answer is no, time for a rewrite or a whole new story." Writers needs to be honest with themselves when it comes to evaluating their own work. That's why writer groups are a huge help if you can find one.
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Without having read your script, my recommendation would be to combine 2 (or more) characters. I've found that oftentimes that supporting characters are usually there to serve the story (especially in horror) so if you can find a way to simplify that as much as you can it might help!
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At a story level, your side characters are really just a soundboard for your main protagonist. They don't have to have their own journey and growth, just reinforce your heroes in various ways such as through contrast, support, and stagnation.
At a production level, it can make a huge budgetary difference having a reduced cast of regulars. Something worth looking into are "day players", these are actors who come in for just a day or two to shoot all their scenes and thus a production can bring in a big name at an affordable price.
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Sometimes merging characters is a good solution to this. It can make several one-dimensional characters into a smaller number of multi-faceted ones