On October 7th, I hosted a webinar called "How Professional Screenwriters Create Great Characters", where I talked about how to come up with interesting and unique characters, as well as how tapping into your everyday life interactions with people can help with this. This episode addresses questions you asked in our Q&A session that we didn't have time to answer. There's lots of great info here, make sure you watch.

Show Notes

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Autogenerated Transcript

Michael Jamin:

I feel like we're overthinking this a little bit. I feel like maybe we're giving labels that don't need to be labeled. We have a hero. We're going to put this hero on a journey. And who are the people? Or if it's a like a buddy comedy or whatever we're talking about, or if it's a husband and wife or whatever, what's the story? What's the journey we're putting them on and who are the characters we're going to get in their way? You're listening to What the Hell is Michael Jamin talking about? I'll tell you what I'm talking about. I'm talking about creativity, I'm talking about writing, and I'm talking about reinventing yourself through the arts.

Hey everyone, it's Michael Jamin, and today we're going to answer the question, what the hell is Michael Jamin talking about? Well, today I'm talking about questions from my previous webinar. As many of you know, I do a webinar every three weeks or so where I talk about screenwriting and it's about an hour long and you're all invited and it's free. And I don't always have time to answer all these questions, but Phil is here with us visiting again. Hello, Phil. Hello and happy to be here. He's going to hit me with some of these questions we're going to answer.

Phil Hudson:

Lemme hit you baby one more time. Let's do it. All right. So again, kind of group questions, context for everyone. This was from a webinar talking about how professional screenwriters create great characters. You've got another really good webinar that a lot of people really like, which is how to write a great story. And so contextually, these are really more character based. There's some miscellaneous stuff, there's some break in questions. We've kind of grouped them together. So as I go through these, we'll just try to keep 'em on theme and let's get into it. Let's talk craft. Think Craft is always a good place to start. Anna Renee Chavez wants to know what big differences are there between writing for animation versus live action?

Michael Jamin:

Great question. Oh, and I just want to clarify everybody by webinars, you are free. Go to michaeljamin.com/webinar to sign up. I changed the topics, but whatever. So this woman wants to know what's the difference between writing for animation and live action? Not that much in terms of, and I teach 'em both in my course. The differences really are not that different. The only thing you want to think about is well ask yourself why is this show animated? What's the advantages to making this show animated? So in BoJack Horseman, it's a very real and grounded show, but you have horses talking and fish talking, or Whitney, you couldn't do that in live action. So you're taking advantage of the medium. If you have it animated, take advantage of it. When my partner and I did Glen Martin DDS, which is the show there a stop motion animation, we would ask ourselves, what's Clay tastic about this? We'd call it, because it wasn't claymation, but we pretended it was claymation. So what's Clay tastic about this scene? Is someone's head going to come off? So for example, we did an episode where the character, the boy got his head stuck in an elephant's ass. You can't do that in live action. So you can do that in animation, but the story itself, it's very similar. The stories are very similar. It's just that you just take advantage of the medium.

Phil Hudson:

Yeah, awesome. And I think another good example of this, where a choice was made to do live action RET link's buddy system, you had mentioned to me that one point that it's basically just a cartoon. It's like a live action cartoon with silly It is, but they can't be as silly as they could if it was animated and they could do whatever they wanted. So it still kind of grounds it in this reality, but it's still a bit silly.

Michael Jamin:

Yeah, it could have been a cartoon, but we would've gone even we did one episode where we turned Lincoln into a robot because the character was like, my life would be easier if I was a robot. So that probably would've been even better if it was animated. But in real life we just started putting 'em in crappy robot costumes.

Phil Hudson:

Yeah,

Michael Jamin:

But it was funny. We turned him into a robot, so it was kind of broad.

Phil Hudson:

Love it. Julia Wells considering extraordinary and ordinary pairing. What would you say about friends, how I Met Your Mother, or shows that are more grounded? I think this is in reference in your webinar when you're talking about your characters and putting your characters together or how you write your characters for a specific story, and there's a difference between extraordinary and ordinary if you want something extraordinary when you're pairing your characters together.

Michael Jamin:

Well, yeah, most shows are like that. Most sitcoms, the characters are just normal people. And yeah, it was kind of like ordinary characters, kind of an extraordinary situations where it would've been unusual. I'm trying to think of an example from friends, but alright, so they did an episode where Joey and Joey and what's his name, not Kramer Chandler, the guy Chandler are going to sit in their chairs all episode, all ordinary guys doing something extraordinary. They're not going to move from their chairs and they're going to see if they get everything delivered and they're going to eat and drink and they're not going to get up, stuff like that. So I don't think it's any different from any other sitcom I've worked on other than the characters.

Phil Hudson:

I just started re-watching How I Met Your Mother, which I've seen who knows how many times. But it's a good background show while I'm working on stuff that's not necessarily logical, analytical stuff. And there's an episode where it's the Halloween party and he's the hanging Chad because he met the sexy pumpkin in 2001 during the election or 1999 or whatever. And so Barney's got tickets to the Victoria's Secret model, Christmas Halloween costume party, and he's trying to get his friend to this extraordinary thing and his friend won't leave. He wants to be at this party to potentially meet this girl on this rooftop again. And it's the push and pull of Come be amazing, stop looking for love, you're losing. So it plays really well in that situation. Alright, cool. AIA Saunders or AIA Sanders, I apologize for ruining that. How do you feel about basing a character on them knowing themselves or basing a character on yourself and your own doubts?

Michael Jamin:

Yeah, do it all. I mean, you should do it. You should totally mind your own life For stories, and I have a whole module on this in the course, and you can disguise it too, so people don't have to know it's you, but you're just stealing parts of yourself or parts of people as other characters, but you change it enough and change the name, but also change professions and change. You're just stealing attributes from people so they wouldn't know it. But that's what your life is for your life is to steal things from

Phil Hudson:

Perfect. Charles Shin, do you have any tips or advice with coming up with great names for your characters?

Michael Jamin:

I spoke a little bit about this in the old days. We used to have a baby naming book, my partner and I, and then now it's kind of easy to go on the internet or just in life. You'll come across a street name and you go, oh, that's a good last name for a character. I just kind of keep a list. What was one? I had one the other day I added to my list, I can't remember, but it was like a street sign I go that I passed. I go, that's a good character's name.

Phil Hudson:

Yeah. I've also seen our showrunners on Tacoma fd. There's a random character as Chief Phil Dylan. Well, I'm Phil. It was the writer's pa and I replaced Dylan, the writer's pa.

Michael Jamin:

Yeah, it's funny. I know they took that for you. I mean, they tend to do that a lot where at least Steve Lemi does. He'll just name characters after people he knows.

Phil Hudson:

Yeah. There's one line from Ike in an episode that I think you guys wrote. It's like Benjamin Duff or Benjamin Crump

Michael Jamin:

And

Phil Hudson:

Ben Crump was our DIT set. Right. So just throw people's names and give 'em fun stuff. Awesome. You also talked, I think you talked about funny names that go together too. At one point that was something you do.

Michael Jamin:

I talked about, I had a character named, what was his name? Something

Phil Hudson:

The third? It was something the fourth. The fourth, yeah. What was his

Michael Jamin:

Name? God, I can't remember.

Phil Hudson:

It was like, but it was a bunch of things together t