Stanislavski's Character Building Techniques

In this post I will be looking at how to build the character of Julie J by means of looking at Stanislavski's work as a guide and then creating my own character from there.

One of the first steps Stanislavski puts in place to build a character is looking at external figures and picking up gestures or physical aspects of other people and then amplifying them. For example if someone stood with their shoulders rounded forward, you would copy that form and multiply it to make it bigger and more obvious and after doing that you would adjust it to see if you felt it suited your character.

"Each person evolves an external characterisation out of

himself according to his intuition and his observation of

himself and others." (Tortsov Stanislavski)

I took this technique and applied it to my own characterisation development. I looked at the way people walked, including their pace, posture and any other defining quality's they had and repeated them. I found that the quality's that I thought suited Julie J from watching her character in other performances was atributes such as slupped posture, fairly slow movement and not very direct and a bit of fidleing with clothes or hands etc.