by Can Tran

Created on: February 18, 2009

I admit it I am one of those people that watches over people. I do not stalk people. Within the last few years, I have taken up an interesting in watching people. It allowed me to study and analyze them. I had never realized how beneficial it would be by watching people. So far, I have a bunch of projects going on. All of them allowed me to utilize the knowledge gained by watching people left and right.

When I worked the John Kerry campaign back in 2004, I had spent a lot of time at the campaign headquarters. At late night, there was nothing much to do. However, I would quietly listen to everything that was going on. Normally people would call that a bad thing. But, it would prove to be a good thing. By watching how the people had operated, I saw how a political campaign was run. I had seen how to and how not to run a political campaign. It had me questioning whether or not I ever wanted to do anymore political campaigning in the future.

As a freelance screenwriter, I saw that people-watching is very valuable. When you look at the different people, you get ideas for different character appearances. In thinking about what and how characters appear, I would tend to go looking at people.
When coming up with character concepts, it is incredibly important that you watch people. You have to watch what they do, how they behave, and how they react in a situation. When creating characters, you have to make them convincingly as possible. If they are not convincing, then your characters are not that impressive. Nobody is going to care about your characters at all.

I am in the midst of working on a Japanese anime series. I have been busy working on creating a diverse cast of characters.
However, I would not have been able to create such characters. When creating a diverse cast of characters takes much time and research. If I wanted to create Latino characters, I would have to research Latino issues. If I wanted to create African characters, I would have to research African issues. A good deal of my research revolves around watching people.

The same thing goes for creating video game characters. Creating a video game is the same as creating a movie. Video games do have characters most of the time. If I wanted to create convincing characters for some adventure, fighting, or role-playing game, I would have to watch people and how they react.
Still, people-watching is not necessarily limited to writing. There are many careers that make good use of people-watching.

If you work in

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