Things a good character needs to be successful

1. PERSONALITY - This is important because if each character has the same personality then that would make the storyline very boring or even if they changed a characters personality trait then the audience would also become confused. For example, if you had a Dalek who could have feelings and be kind towards other people/aliens (that would be against time and space) it wouldn't go right with the storyline - they are suppose to take over the world and EXTERMENATE every last living thing on the planet. Also the character needs to make the plot unique and they need to show different characteristics that you wouldn't see in another character, this then tells each character apart and you either hate them or love them for it!

2. AGENCY - Agency means that the character is active, not passive, this is where the character makes decisions and is attempting to control his/her own destiny as an independent operator within the story. Also this gives the audience a better look into there past life and that they feel as though they have been with them all the way through there life's. When filming someone you wouldn't want them to become a scarecrow who doesn't have a brain and didn't act like a character that would be boring. What you do need is someone like The Doctor, who has different faces and different personality traits by saving the whole universe with his TARDIS you certainly got to love him for that!

3. MOTIVATION - Characters want things. They need things. They are motivated by these desires and requirements and they spend an entire story trying to full fill them. Without motivation characters like Sherlock Holmes would never get a case solved, The Doctor wouldn't save planets from alien threats and The Avengers wouldn't of ever become Avengers. All of these well known characters need motivation to become what they want to be, if that's saving life forms from a dangerous alien threat then go for it, just always make sure that a character is motivated to get every plot solved.

4. CONNECTIONS TO OTHER CHARACTERS - We respond well to those characters who contain a little bit of us. We want to relate to them. The best characters are a broken mirror: we want to see ourselves reflected back, if in a distorted, unexpected way. Many characters have different connections to different characters, whether that may be love, hate or friendship it all resolves around the plot of a film and what is needed to make it run smoothly till the end with many of the plots having a twist at the end, something that you weren't really expecting to happen.

5. EMOTIONS - A character without emotion is soulless . They don’t exactly need to reveal those emotions to the world around them, but they should reveal them to you as the reader, as well. Characters feel things! They feel sorrow. Anger. Despair. Love. Hate. Friendship. Many characters need these emotions to show what there character actually is like, but they need to be completely different to the other characters around them to show a bit of individuality.

6. THE RIGHT NAME - The name is important to a character to show who they really are. You wouldn't want names that are already out there because sometimes the audience thinks that character is going to be like the character that is already out there like "Coraline" or "Martha Jones" it is easier to choose a name that hasn't been used before to make the film unique and then people can't compare them to another character as well. Also you want a name that doesn’t sound like the name of another character in your film, the reason for this is that you don’t want readers confused and you want them to just sit and enjoy the film.

Above is some ideas that I need to use when making my own character, it has to be different to everyone else's and have it's own personality and dialect so the audience can then tell each character apart. Click here for an example of a character profile.