ARGONAUTS:
DESIGNING A CHARACTER TEAM
Create a team of diverse characters for your screenplay, modeling them on the Argonauts!
What’s Inside:
The idea of using the crew of the Argo ship as a model for a diverse character team came from a work on a student project that involved having that team picked out by a monster, one character at a time.
The screenplay was a little like “Alien” or “Predator” – a homage to the uncomplicated 1980s. We had a crew of cool people, stuck in a confined space, and we wanted to give each character some unique characteristics and things to do.
This led us to the myth of Argonauts.
Argo must have been a small boat, by contemporary standards, but according to the myth, it certainly had a lot of people sailing on it. Even though there was some overlap in what each Argo crew member was in charge of, we could distill quite a number of unique roles.
This gave us a list of character traits, roles and archetypes, long and robust enough to create our crew.
After that screenplay was completed, we used the same list of many screenplays in other genres. It probably won’t work for every story you may ever want to tell – but it may be useful sometimes, so here it is!