Creating Development Exercise

We were asked to create a character with a clear emotional want and need and then elaborate as much as we could on their story. We had to give them a name, age, want and reason they can't have their want. For this we also all picked a piece of paper at random with a story element on it.

Mine was: What nobody ever told you.

I created a 10 year old character called Gary. I wanted his setting to be a school and his want to be an emotional want as opposed to a material/physical want.

I had the idea of Gary's want being a desire to fit in with a 'cool' group at his school and that nobody has ever told him/ he has never realised that he is bigger and stronger than his peers. 

This realisation causes inner conflict for Gary because although he the becomes part of the 'cool' crowd, his new friends want him to use his physicality to their benefit and throw his weight around.

There are 2 ways the story could go, Gary could start to abuse his power and do the bidding of this group or he could refuse and be cast out by them. The story could come full circle when Gary, because of his pacifism, befriends a nice, non-violent group of children.

Because this idea is set in a school and centred around somewhat stereotypical character types I thought it would work well as an animation in which the characters are portrayed as anthropomorphic animals such as a gorilla or elephant for Gary as he is a gentle giant type character and a snake as the leader of the 'cool' group who attempts to lead Gary astray.

The whole idea for this made me think of the film Let Him Have It (1991) by Peter Medak in which a young man with learning difficulties is coaxed into crime by a group of wannabe gangsters.