experiment

I had made a test animation to check that everything would work well, this is not a very well produced practice animation as throughout the video, you can see a hand that is moving the sweets every few seconds. Once we had made a few test animations, we were ready to produce our real animation, which would be a lot more well made and of a higher quality standard to the target audience. This animation was approximately 24 frames per second which made the outcome of our video almost 10 seconds long. If this was our real thing, then we would have had to cut down the video due to it not being finished and it would have been too long.

questionnaire- results

The questionnaire is based on designing an e4 ident so i have some information to base it on. me and a friend went round asking 30 different people with an age range between 15-25 to see what the outcome was of the results. I asked a series of questions to do with television, brands and genres to get a general idea of what people think, what is their favourite, and which ones appeal tot hem the most.

For the statistics that were shown in the surveys that we handed out to 30 different people, I then made a pie chart for each question to come to a conclusion of things like which brand was favoured and so on.

From this pie chart, I have got that majority of the people that I gave my survey to were female, and not so many male. Around 2/3 were female.

Most of the people that I surveyed for this questionnaire were aged from 15-17. Coming not far behind that were people aged from 18-21. Not so many people were aged from 22-25 and no one at all that I surveyed was aged 26 or over.

From this question, as I result I got a very different mixture of votes for each programme that is listed. Many of the people that I had asked had voted for another channel which was not listed on this question. Apart from that, the most watched programme which is listed on this question was E4, this is understandable as E4 appeals to majority of the people who are aged between 15-35. This survey also shows us that BBC 2 and Channel 5 are the least watched channels, I think this is because they have the least appealing programme on these channels, and that they are generally for people over the age of 35.

This question shows that almost everyone enjoys a comedy as this got the most votes. Science Fiction and Documentaries are the least favourite, I think that this is due to these types of films being less interesting and appealing to majority of the people who I asked, and that they do not phase many people that are aged between 15-35.

As I guessed, people do watched set programmes daily. For the people who had said yes, I asked them why. The answers that came up the most were Eastenders and Hollyoaks. For the people who do not watch set programmes daily, i asked them if they still watch television for at least an hour a day and most of them do, but a mixture of programmes each day.

The Inbetweeners was proven the most watched programme on E4 by people aged between 15-21, Hollyoaks then coming in second was the next most watched programme on E4. Where as quite a few people still said that they watch E4, just not the programmes which were listed in the question.

This question tells us that most people preferred the ident from E4 which was of the beach scene, the E4 hotel room ident was still liked, just not as much as the beach one. Majority of the people who liked the E4 beach ident was mainly girls. This could say that they like outdoor activities or that they will prefer to be on the beach than in a hotel room indoors.

Seeing as the people we asked for this question were aged between 15-21, most of them said that Dubstep was their favoured type of music to listen to. I think that this is because Dubstep is a well known genre out at the moment and its fairly new to people nowadays because it is a different type of music which has recently been welcomed onto the market, especially because the people are young that we have surveyed, they were more likely to pick Dubstep as their favourite music.

As you can tell, Topshop was the favoured brand out of the five others. Both male and females favoured Topshop over any other brand there. I asked them to write down which brand that they liked the most and which they shopped at. I did not give them an option, these are the brands which they chose.

From this questionnaire, we have got the result of Twitter being the most used social network site. Facebook being the next one, and the rest not as used.

The Olympics 2012 advert was shown as the most favoured advert out of the two. Nearly 3/4 of the people chose this advert. both of these adverts had come out at the same time, the start of the summer 2012. I asked a few people as to why they thought this, they said that they preferred the Olympics 2012 advert as it was much more eye-catching and that they liked how it was animated.

http://youtu.be/vFSaGi4niB4 - e4 beach i dent 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeJp-KHFP0Q -e4 hotel ident

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cVrjFlt4hI-olypic advert
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp1PNEfHg1o-christmas advert

history of stop motion

Stop motion animation is also called stop-frame animation.  This technique includes capturing frames at every movement to produce a moving film. 

Some early examples of stop motion animation is seen the ‘Humpty Dumpty Circus’ (1898) by Albert E Smith and James Stuart Blackton. The audience at the time were shocked at what they saw because they had never seen anything like it before. 

Stop motion has changed since the early 20^th Century and hardly used anymore, only in some advertisements and children’s TV shows.  With the development of 3D animation it became much easier and a faster process and allows the characters to seem to be alive and flow better. 

pixilation

Pixilation is the only form of stop motion animation that has people posing frame to frame instead of an object.  Pixelation involves using live talent and shooting them frame by frame, just as with other forms of stop motion. “El Hotel Eléctrico” (1905) by Segundo de Chomon is an example which also features object animation. 

The type of media Pixilation is currently used for is in music videos, advertisements and feature films.  A strange and creepy feature film was made in 1993 ‘Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb’ by the bolexbrothers using the exact technique you can see in part 1 of the ‘ below.

The target audience for this type of animated film using pixilation is adults as the content would be too creepy for a young audience.  The influence behind this animation was the Christmas season but was rejected by the BBC for being too dark for the festive season. 

I think it is effective because it shows a good comparison and contrast between stop motion where live actors and puppets share the same frame.  It works because they seem to blend in with each other to make this type of animation effective. 

claymation

Claymation uses plasticine characters and objects in this type of animation.   Claymation is used in the same way that stop motion animation is created by taking the pictures in a sequence and adjusting the clay as you do so and is most probably the main associate of stop motion animation.

Claymation was created around 1908 when the 'Sculpture Nightmare' was found to be a big hit with the viewers and so four years after it was created Claymation became really popular and became more frequent after 1897 when an art teacher invented plasticine which was so much easier to create moving objects. In time animators began putting wire skeletons which made models move like people with more ease for example. Wallace and Gromit use this technique with the wire skeleton frames.

Claymation is often now used in cartoons, TV and advertisements.  One example of a famous claymation is Wallace and Gromit which is a British series consisting of four animated short films and a feature film.  The characters are made out of moulded plasticine on metal armatures.  The characters are influenced on the very stereotypical British, which makes it appealing.  The target audience is mainly teenagers and adults but can also appeal to children. 

I think that it is successful because the concept behind Wallace and Gromit appeals to most people and the claymation technique improves the appeal because the concept may not work if real actors were used instead, for example, the bully dog character in ‘A Close Shave’ (1995)

puppet animation

Puppet animation is a development from object animation where instead of using objects, puppets are used. Puppet animation is a development of stop-motion animation, rather than using objects in different frames puppets were introduced due to their human like quality’s so directors can move the puppet freely and more easily to show different movements.  It works by taking pictures and moving the puppet in different frames. 

The film ‘The Humpty Dumpty Circus’ (1908) created by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert smith receives credit as the first stop-motion animation film that features puppets.  

The history of puppet animation then carries on with the pioneer puppet animator from Russia, Ladislas Starewitch who was a film maker who created ‘The Cameraman’s Revenge’ (1912) and later produced his feature length puppet animation ‘Le Roman de Renard’ (1929-1930) which translates as ‘The Tale of the Fox’. The story was based on the 11^th century tale of ‘Reynard the fox’.

These days puppet animation is most commonly used in children’s cartoons and films.  An example of puppet animation used in cinema is in the film King Kong (1933).  The writer/director Tim Burton often uses puppet animation in his work for example, Corpse Bride (2005) which is a stop motion animated horror musical.  The Nightmare before Christmas (1993) is an American stop motion musical fantasy horror film directed by Henry Selick.  It used 227 puppets to represent the characters in the film and also 400 heads were used to allow the expression for every possible emotion. 

The target audience for this type of puppet animation is mainly teenagers and adults because of the dark themes.  I think these types of films are successful because of the use of puppet animation and the voice of famous actors.  It would not be as successful if actors were used instead of puppet animation.  Puppet animation is used as an advantage to show different character types and personalities. 

Object Animation

Object animation is a type of animation which only uses objects.  The technical process involves taking a series of images of any object, such as a shoe and moving the shoe slightly and taking a photograph at every movement.  These are then linked together by uploading the images onto final cut pro and then adjusting their frames per second to create a sequence of film.  This type of animation is currently used in adverts and children's animation films. 

Object animation is the oldest stop motion technique and was first used at the turn of the 20th Century.  "The Humpty Dumpty Circus" (1898) by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton is a first example. 

A current example of object animation is used in the TV advert:  EDF Energy Blue to attact members of the UK public to switch over to EDF Energy.  This is a good example of the application of comtempory object animation and is acheived by a using a 'morph' type character as the main focus who is shown moving from two levels of emotion - from dull and gloomy to bright and joyful once the background music changes from sad piano to the famous upbeat Hawaii Five O soundtrack. 

An influence of it's production seems to have come from a past childhood character 'Morph' who was formed using clay.  This advert's character has no features apart from a large pair of eyes.  This would make the viewer have empathy with the character.  The voiceover in the advert also encourages viewer reaction. 

The animation is very simplistic but effective in a sense because the actual character does not move very much but it doesn't really need to as the soundtrack and voiceover helps to generate audience reaction and emotion. 

This is a sucessful example of how object animation has been used in current adverting because it is memoriable due to the soundtrack and use of the little character.  Reviews on Youtube suggest that most people who have seen the advert have found it catchy because it has been influenced by music from the past.


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