Project #5 - The Brief

So, following the interviews and discussions I had with practitioners with regards to my report, the point Chris Phillips made about misleading players through the physicality of a character got me thinking.
This approach to designing characters could potentially work fairly well. However I wanted to explore this a little bit, to investigate people's reactions to a character when they don't turn out to be that which they would have expected. Obviously there's the risk of this kind of thing becoming satire, a mockery of archetypes in a way.

A quick experiment, I want to simply gauge how people perceive characters from their appearances alone i.e. their physicality, clothes, body language etc. 

THE BRIEF

My intention for this small project is to: 

• Create three characters with rather different and unlikely stories/personalities/characteristics
• Design them with notably different physicality 
• I will then survey a group of volunteers to investigate the kind of character they percieve each one to be, based on visual appearance alone.
• To provide them with the character information and let them see which characters they think each background info belongs to.

If they are successfully mislead, I then want to know whether these candidates were pleasantly surprised by this or not, whether it aids good character development or is a hindrance. 

And of course, a few case studies is where I begin.