Stan Winston on Character Design

You might not know who Stan Winston is, but you certainly know some of his characters. Winston is the visual designer who brought to life two models of terminator, 800 and 1000, the Aliens, and the Predator among many others. Getting his start in a made-for-TV movie called Gargoyles, which also won him an Emmy, Winston has been using makeup puppeteering, animatronics, and (more recently) digital wizardry to make the fantastic real.

I was lucky enough to attend a recent talk Winston gave at Electronic Arts' Redwood Shores studio. Winston comes across as refreshingly self-depreciating, considering the stereotypes of movie industry personalities we're all familiar with. He's quick to confess that these days he really doesn't do a lot of the hands-on work at his studio, nor does he really understand exactly how every effect at his studio works, but he's plenty happy to plaster his name in giant letters over it. He's also well versed in many geek fetishes, from comic books to toys to videogames. With respects to the latter, Winston surprised me by actually being familiar with current generation titles. I can only hope to be so with it when I, too, have grandkids.

Towards the end of the talk, one of the developers in the audience posed a problem to Stan: How do you create a strong character when you don't have much, if any, story? Winston conceded that this was a very difficult problem, but it was one that he also had faced in the film industry. When Winston was brought on board the Predator movie, it had already been shot. The monster they had wasn't working, so they needed Winston to build a replacement. In the movie, the Predator's character is never really discussed, but he's the title character, so he still had to be very compelling. Winston started by looking for existing images that told the kind of story he wanted to tell about the Predator, and eventually wound up basing the designs off a statue of a Rastafarian warrior, and working outward from there.

Anyone who has ever studied improvisational theatre will quickly grok this idea. A character's backstory is told by how a character stands and moves, the pitch of her voice, and her general attitude. Even with heavy narrative elements, backstory has to be told in those ways first, because if the words about the character don't keep with her actions, the audience sees through the illusion. When asked if there was any particular game that he felt exemplified how strong character can be done in games, Winston named Devil May Cry without skipping a beat (with the quick caveat that he felt the story needed work).

The talk ended much too soon for my tastes, but Stan had a plane to catch. Promises to keep, and so on.

Comments

[Clubberjack]

Tim Schafer of Doublefine (and LucasArts before that) gave a talk at GDC this year on character design. He mainly focused on developing deep and convincing characters by writing lots of backstory. My main takeaway was a process of character development in which Tim created Friendster profiles for each of the secondary characters for his upcoming game, Psychonauts. He didn't go so far as to actually post them on Friendster (IP issues perhaps), but it did seem like a fruitful endeavor regardless.

He was able to fill out each profile as though writen by the character. This forced him to decide on things like a last name, a gender, hometown, favorite movies, and so on. In addition, he was forced to think about what pictures they would upload. The best part of this exercise (in my opinion) was that doing a Friendster profile required figuring out what other people would be in the character's friends list. On top of that, Tim wrote out lists of testimonials from the characters to each other. Thus, going into the game, Tim had a great idea of who each character was, and, more importantly, he had a solid set of existing relationships to build on. Brilliant.

[zod]

One of my favourite playwrights and directors, David Mamet, is, as far as I know, completely against the concept of backstory or having a character "act their backstory" (see "On Directing Film"). Somehow, his stories have some of the most vivid characters ever. I think backstory is a total crutch, and rarely do its effects actually come through in the final result. The example of the Predator being based on a Rastafarian warrior is a pretty tenuous link to your final paragraph -- that seem like a purely visual prototype.

[ClockworkGrue]

What I was getting at in the last paragraph was that the visual prototype of the statue provided lots of information on how the character stood, posture, etc, which might suggest a certain attitude, which itself might suggest what the character sounds like, and so on. As this information continues to glom onto the character in our minds, we start to get a feel for the character's life... backstory, present and possible future.

[Ursula K. LeGuin]

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

[outsider]

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