"All Aboard" - E4 Animation Evalutation

How Did I Exhibit My Work?

There are many different ways I could have exhibited my work. I could have invited everyone to a screening. I could have done a public screening and handed out questionnaires after. I  decided to screen my animation on YouTube. This way I can get feedback potentially from all across the country and even the world. I uploaded my video and along with it I linked a survey to get some more feedback on my E Sting.

I asked these questions;

1. Did you enjoy my E Sting?

2. Whats your gender?

3. What genre would you classify this?

4. What could be done to improve?

5. Could you tell this was stop motion?

6. Did you like the way the scene looked?

7. Who do you think this E Sting was aimed at?

8. Could you see this on E4's channel?

I waited three days to get a appropriate responses and give myself time to prepare what to do with the data. So I gathered my data and inputted them into my graph software and created some charts.

To start, I would like to begin with the genders. All my responses were male. This isn't good when it comes to the difference in response.

Ideally I would like to have an equal amount of both female and male responses in order to get the best feedback and to work from it. This would make my findings unbiased and more even when analysing them.

I then asked what genre they thought my ESting was.

I gave minimal options and left an other option in order to get proper feedback and legitimate opinions.

When we made the E Sting we said it is a light hearted comedy. After looking into the responses I found that most of the people agreed with that having three say comedy. Which therefore meant we achieved the feel we wanted to convey.

I feel as we could have added more genre answers to hopefully gather a more concise set of results. However it would have seemed pointless to have genres which my ESting clearly wasn't. Eg; Thriller.

Then we asked if anyone thought our idea is original. Our idea was inspired by childhood memories rather than other videos so we were interested to see what people thought of our ESting idea.

Through our responses we an see that all our respondents thought it was. This is good to see because it showed us our ideas were in fact original which fitted the brief given by E4.

This question was fairly vague, we assumed people knew what original meant and assuming is not a good idea when it comes to audience research.

The next question I wanted to ask was if the mise en scene looked the part. I wanted to make the viewers believe it was legitimate and could be seen on the official E4 channel.

The majority said yes the mise en scene was good. This gave us a good feeling as we worked on making the lighting and post production colour correction a professional look with the budget we had.

Problem with this question was the wording of the question. "Did you like the way the scene looked?" I feel like this isn't so much vague it was more poorly worded and too informal. If I could redo the research I would change the question too;

 "Did the setting of my ESting look professional and convincing?"

This wording gives a more professional feel to our audience research which is essentially what we want.

The next thing I wanted to find out was if the viewers actually enjoyed the E Sting.

Through my survey and graph you can see that they did. 100% of my 10 respondents did.

Again like a few other of my questions this seemed vague in its wording. If I could redo the research I would change the wording of the question too;

"Would you say you found my ESting enjoyable?"

This way it gives a opened-ended answer possibilities. For more in-depth responses.

I wanted to find out if the viewers could tell that the E Sting was actually stop motion and not a video.

I got another 100% response for yes. Which could either mean it was really good or really bad. This question could have been redone to get a better answers as it was too vague.

The final question I asked was if the viewers could imagine this E Sting on the actual E4 channel. Again I got a 100% yes answer which made me feel good because of the effort we put into it came out good in the end.

I don't have any issues with the wording of this question.

Creative Aspects;

I want to talk about the technical and creative aspects of my E4 ESting. We used stop motion which was my first time doing this so the whole filming and planning process was new to me.

We decided right from the start that we wanted to portray a childish bedroom feel to the ESting. We go to work on how we could have done this, We started by gathering toys that we had from our childhood without running any risks of sentimental harm.  

We knew we wanted the toys themselves to spell out the E4 logo which would transition to the official logo. We got to work on how we could have spelled our the E4 logo. We decided that as kids arts and crafts were a big deal, this lead us on to talking about the use of paper as children and how we used to just cut all the paper up like confetti. This made us thinking further and came to the conclusion that we would use hundreds of little individual pieces of paper that are coloured to spell out the E4 logo. 

With our toys in mind as well as the method on how the logo will be spelled we went about finding ways the toys could spell the logo.

We looked at the toys we had, we had toy car, train and a bunch of individual little people. We thought about how cars leave tire marks in sand and other surfaces. This lead us to the decisions for all the toys to leave unorganised paper trails behind them and for them to spell out the logo. 

We started with the car, the car would create the outer four. The train would then appear and create the inner four. Then the individual people would hope out of the train and spell the "E" in the middle before hopping back on the train and zooming off at the end.

With a clear and complex plan we story boarded and headed out to shoot.

While on the shoot to keep the childlike feel we ensured the lighting was soft lighting not harsh to give the colours a shine to them. Even in post we made the decision to boost the colours and sharpen the overall image.

Did I come across any constraints when making my ESting?

The main constraint that we personally came across was time management. As a college student we had hour lesson slots to film within. We did have double lessons which equaled a totally of two hours film time. This would not have been such a big problem if we was not filming at a different location to the college. The location we filmed at was a good fifthteen minute walk. Meaning thirty minutes was taken from are hour slots. As for cost etc. We found that wasn't an issue as we had all the props already.

It took us three days in totally to shoot the E Sting. two one hour slots and a double to finish. We managed ourselves and made sure self disciplined to get the project done to be finished for the deadline.

We ran into a issue to where we couldn't access the studio space at the time we wanted. This delayed us massively taking a big chunk out of production schedule. Luckily we worked through it and keep on track. So access to the location was a constraint.

Television is hugely impactful because it can access viewers in there homes. Regulators were set up to monitor what we see and what material is broadcasted. In 2003 Ofcom took over the responsibilities of the Independent Television Commission (ITC) Ofcom were made responsible for the programmes, television and sponsorship and the volume of advertisement shown on television.

A constraint we could have faced was the constraint by Ofcom. Ofcom regulate television and what can and can not be seen. We had to ensure we didn't breach this and therefore break the law. They are responsible for licencing all UK commercial television. When we were planning the ESting we had to consider the consequences if we breached regulations.

Did we meet the briefs content requirements?

The E4 website said very little in terms of the content that the E Sting should contain. This is probably so that they can receive wacky and creative E Stings. The only real law they set is that you must use one of the provided soundtracks. Which we did with ours.

Here is the brief we received;

The brief was very specific on what to conclude and what not to conclude. The content of the actual ESting is the most specific. "You can not include any explicit or violent in the daytime" This is later toned down by saying maybe after watershed which past nine of o'clock. They also allow your idea to be "naughty" but as long as it is implied rather than outright shown. But common sense is required.

FEEDBACK

Looking at the graphs and feedback we received it's safe to say that the responses where all positive. Good comments and constructive feedback what was helpful to us. My peers all said that the idea was original and clever some even saying retro due to use of old toys;

Tutors commented on the technical side to the production pointing out a few flaws within the shooting. How some shots lighting was different to others.

 The subtle changes in shot was noticed and picked up on.

Personal Feedback;

Overall I am happy with how the project turned out. I believed our idea was executed to the image we thought up in pre production.

I wanted to produce a child-like feel and was inspired by Toy Story. I wanted the actual E4 logo to be child-like and that is why I used paper instead of just a pen. The paper itself was cut randomly in order to give it that unorganized child-like feel.

As for the execution of the project; I feel we did it justice in the pre/post production. I liked how we didn't have any issue on the shoot other than having to spand it across two days rather than one which caused us issues.

The shoot lasted across two days which in turn gave us lighting issues between the two shots. We attempted to correct this through "brightness and contrast" on premier pro.

What have I learnt from this project

All the projects I have made up until this point have been less preparation to this. this project taught me the values of time management. How I need to ensure preparation is done for locations and all factors are considered before we start shooting.

Potential media industry worker?

As of this moment in time I feel like I would not be able to work within the media industry. This is because I still have lots to learn within myself as well as skills needed to function effectively. This isn't me saying I would not like to in the future no. I want to be the best I can be and practicing and challenging myself is how I will do this.

Animation further?

As much as I enjoyed working with animation and learning how difficult it truly is. I can't see myself doing it in the future it doesn't get me as creative as acting or normal motion cinema and production. I would do it again but as a full time career I can't see myself doing it.