Introduction - Authors and Directors create characters that are easy to identify through actions, costume, words and sounds.
Appearance - The way a character is dressed or described lets us see what his or her personality is like. For example Snape in The Sorcerer’s Stone, he has pale skin, greasy black hair, a hooked nose and dark robes with a mysterious presence. The author has done this because usually people who wear dark clothes are stereo-typically bad characters.
Environment - The environment is very important to give us more clues about the character, for example, Snape's class is in an old, dark dungeon where he teaches potions and talks about it in a passionate way, which leads us to believe that he his passion is potions and he likes to be in dark spaces.
Actions - Another thing that tells us about our character is their actions. In The Sorcerer's Stone, Snape has a very strong presence and always has the class silent “the gift of keeping a class silent without effort.” When he integrates Harry with questions, he ignores Hermione and mocks Harry “Snape's lips curled into a sneer.” After this he answered all the questions he asked to show how experienced he was in his job.
Words - The type of language the character uses and how they say it can tell you a lot about a character. Like Hermione in The Sorcerer’s Stone, she uses quite proper words like “I expect we should be arriving soon” instead of “We are gonna be here soon”. But Ron is different and uses more slang like “bout” making him seem more lazy with his words.
Conclusion - In the end, an author or a director can tell us a lot about a character by what the character looks like, what's around them, what they are doing and what they say.
