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Community Week

     Photostories, for those who don’t know, are essentially comics put together with photos as opposed to drawings. They can be as simple as a few frames making up a one-two-punch joke, or as complicated as several installments of a series. For mine, I use Asian Ball-Jointed Dolls (BJDs for short) to represent my characters, but you can use whatever suits your fancy and your vision.
I’m frequently asked for advice on how I put together my BJD photostories. Here is a step-by-step guide for the process I usually go through, and some tips! Feel free to pick and choose what advice you take away from it. My way may not be the best way for what you want to create, and everyone has their own style, but if you can find anything helpful here, great!

There’s a lot to do before I pick up a camera…the first half of this guide has to do with characterization and developing the players in your story. Feel free to apply it to any sort of story you may be constructing, not just photostories. The second half will deal with the technical aspects.

Character:

     The first step I take is to create the characters. If you already know everything about the people whose stories you’ll be crafting, feel free to skip this part. It may just be me, but I choose my favorite stories based on what happens to whom rather than what happens overall. I’d rather watch my favorite characters sit around reading a dictionary than watch people I don’t care about go on the most fantastic adventure ever. If you have well-developed, grounded, likeable (or even hateful, when necessary) characters, your story will appear around them. Characters should guide events, events shouldn’t guide characters.
My process for creating OCs is very different from my process for developing the character of a BJD. With an OC I decide what I want them to be like and what role I want them to fill in my story, I design their look around that, and then they gradually reveal even more about who they are the longer I write about them. With BJDs, I first order a sculpt that I’ve fallen in love with, get them home, see what looks good on them, what their style is, and get a general ‘feel’ for their personalities before I add them to my photostories. The appearance-personality setup happens backwards. This is not the general way BJD characters are created--most people have a story in mind already and search for a sculpt that looks like the character they’ve already designed, and this way is also very effective. It’s less of a gamble than mine. You can try what works best for you!
Either way, there are several ways to develop your characters from there.

-Personality:

      Personalities are generally built on a combination of one’s history/circumstances, experiences, and predisposition. You should at least have a brief outline of your character's history, even if it doesn't factor into the story's present, so you can understand where they're coming from. The way a person was raised heavily defines who they are. However, even if they come from troubled beginnings, that doesn’t mean they have to remain troubled. They can be surprisingly well-adjusted. Even if they come from old money and a snobbish family, they can still be down-to-earth. This is generally due to experience + predisposition. They will react to different experiences in different ways. It’s up to you to decide how these puzzle pieces will fit together into who your character is now. Their new experiences will also shape who they will become.
     ‘Personality’ is such a broad term that attempts to encompass every facet of the way a character acts and thinks, so I’m going to break it down into a few more categories that will generally come up in the process of telling a story with them.

-Language:
     While it is entirely possible to do a perfectly wonderful photostory without a single spoken word, more often than not, your characters will have things they want to say. How do they say them? Are they soft-spoken, tacit, loquacious? Do they have a firm grasp of grammar, or do they speak broken English? Do they even speak English? Is slang a yes or a no for them? Are they more likely to say ‘gonna’ or ‘going to?’ Do they hesitate? Stutter? Beat around the bush when trying to get to the point? Do they feel comfortable interrupting people, or do they wait for their turn? Do they talk to themselves when they’re alone? Do they express their feelings more with words, body language, or expressions? Admittedly, expressions can be limited when working with BJDs or other static figures, but some slight digital manipulation can bring about effective changes. More on that later.
These are all important things to consider when crafting your character. Once you understand how they speak, it will be something you won’t have to consciously think about. I can have someone pull a perfectly random sentence of dialogue from any of my own OC stories (different from my BJD photostories) and I can tell you who said it. The patterns of their speech and thought are incredibly distinctive to me, even if the readers don't notice them themselves.
     That being said, I’ve known these characters for going on 6 years, so don’t feel bad if you can’t do that yet, and think your speech patterns are no good or something.
     A method I like to use for new characters to make sure their speech patterns are distinctive enough is to ask them all the same question and see how different their answers are. For example: “Why do you wear your hair the way you do?”
Their answers should reveal anything from personality, mindset, level of self-consciousness, how busy they are, how well they respond to being asked useless questions, or even several of these. I’ll use my OCs as opposed to my BJD characters, since I have more of them:

- “Um--heh, it just kinda goes that way.”
- “Um…it’s um…it’s easy to keep this way.”
- “It’s easy and it’s pretty!”
- “Huh. I don’t really think about it, I guess. Is facial hair included? Because I know why that is--it’s because I’m always missing things with the razor.”
- “*sigh* I was told my hair would no longer look too big for my head once I hit six foot-four. Evidently, that is not the case.”
- “…It hides my face from three angles.”
- “Oh, it’s um…it’s just the way I’ve always worn it, ever since I was little…I guess I should probably change it sometime….”
- “It goes well with my face, it’s long enough to try out lots of styles on, and Eizan likes it.”
- “…Well, my father finally crossed the line, didn’t he?”
- “Why? Don’t be stupid, how could that possibly make any difference to anybody?”
- “…I--I don’t have a choice!”
- “Because it’s fetching. And it’s natural.”

Well now, some of their answers ended up revealing a bit too much. Or even confusing viewers by alluding vaguely to their past. But the point is, they’re all different answers because each character is coming from a different place!
Anyway--on to the next segment!

-Style:
     It’s just a good idea to know what your character likes to wear. Otherwise, if they feel frumpy or uncool, they may refuse to pose correctly and your story will be ruined!!! This does not apply if you are using figurines or action figures, or anything else that does not allow for the changing of outfits. But as for what happened with my BJDs and their styles:
Before my girl Theorie arrived, I assumed she would wear a lot of skirts, so I made her tons. They’re sitting unused in a box now, because she turned out to be a short-shorts girl instead. She also shuns the pastels I had planned, and loves bright colors.
Prosper loves Superhero t-shirts, since he’s a comic book enthusiast. Most prominently, ones featuring Wolverine.
Rodya prefers black and white as a color scheme, but often wears colors for his girlfriend’s (Theorie’s) sake, because she likes him in bright tones.
Thackery tries as hard as he can to dress like a cool dude, but misses the mark entirely and ends up wearing the strangest colors and patterns. For example, a gray jacket covered in blue-and-yellow leopard spots, and a shirt sporting pink, blue and green sharks, and little hearts.
Liesel is a toddler and dresses how others dress her, meaning she wears tiny jeans and cute flowery tops when her cousins dress her, and frills and rosy headbands and pretty little dresses when her ‘Auntie Theorie’ dresses her.
Meridian is my newest girl, and she needs muted colors to go with her skin tone/hair so as to not overwhelm her. She also seems fond of tights so far, which is a good thing, considering her new shoes are just a tiny bit too big and putting on tights makes them fit better.
It’s good to keep in mind too that not every character wears what they do because of choice, either. Maybe their family forces them into suits and ties when they’d prefer jeans and t-shirts, or maybe they’re too poor to afford the designer dresses they’d love. Maybe (like with Theorie and Rodya) they dress the way they do to please their boyfriend/girlfriend, or like Liesel, they are too young to choose their own wardrobe.

-Interaction:
     Once you know how your character thinks, speaks and acts, you should begin to develop how your characters feel about each other. However, keep in mind that the way they act toward somebody may not always reflect exactly how they feel about them. For example, politeness may interfere with someone treating a person they hate with contempt. Fear may keep them from treating the love of their life with affection.
Here is a diagram of how 4 of my BJDs feel about each other, for example:

If you remove even one of them, the dynamic changes. Before Thackery arrived, it was Rodya and Theorie against Prosper. Add in Prosper and Rodya’s little cousin, Liesel, and it becomes Rodya and Prosper against Theorie, who wants to dress up their cousin and ‘corrupt’ her with talk of One Direction and other things the 2 boys think are silly and useless. The 4 of them playing a board game together would play out one way, but add in Meridian, whom Thackery has a secret crush on, and suddenly Thackery’s manner becomes much more reserved, fidgety and nervous. Depending on how comfortable your character is meeting new people, and how self-confident they are, their demeanor will change depending on who they’re around and how well they know them, or how they feel about them.

-Trappings:

     This just has to do with odds and ends, likes and dislikes, the fun stuff. Does your character have an obsession? What music and movies do they like? What are their hobbies? Do they always wear a certain piece of jewelry for luck or sentiment? What are their quirks? Do they like to read? Play sports? Build ships in bottles!?! Do they need glasses? Do they wear them as a fashion statement anyway? Do they have any bad habits? Ask them!
It took me two months to figure out what Thackery was like. He was shy, evidently. I thought he was going to be more like Rodya (which is probably what he would like people to believe, since he thinks Rodya is really cool), but he ended up being entirely different. Sometimes it takes a bit to get a character completely figured out. And then there are the truly odd ones…I have an OC I still haven’t been able to figure out much about, and four years after his creation I realized it was because he values himself only as he can be valued and put to use by others, so he doesn’t have much of a sense of self. Sometimes characters won’t fit in the box you designed for them, and that’s ok!
Anyway, it’s a good idea to discover as much as you can about them, even bits of trivia, even if what you learn never comes up in a story. I knew for four years that one of my main OCs was terrified of needles, but there was never an occasion to mention it until last year. Making a list of interesting tidbits is very useful!

Stay tuned for part 2!