Storyboard

For our animation we decided to go down the claymation technique because we believe it would relate to our target audience more and our idea is that the characters are taking a selfie which also relates to our audience because millions of young people in England and even around the world are know for taking and uploading selfies to social media so we thought it would be a successful route to go down due to the popularity of selfie taking. We also thought it would be good to include humour because laughing is a large part of a young persons life to we feel it would keep them even more interested in the animation and carry on watching. We did this by each creating a funny character out of plasticine for the selfie takers mate to change into every time he takes a picture then we are adding a weird animation linking with the character it changes into each time until finally it changes into a plasticine model of the E4 logo. We think this idea reflects the weirdness and randomness included with E4 such as the programmes they show and their other animated advertisement clips.

Production schedule 

This is our production schedule of what tasks we have set each other to complete the assignment faster over the week keeping on track as we go and to finish it to the best standard possible.

My E4 Animation Video

Evaluation

In this project we needed to make an animated advert for E4 that had to show off what the TV channel is about so that it will appeal to their target audience and make them want to continue to carry on watching E4. The TV channel E4 brands itself as a "original', "witty", "eccentric" and "a talking point" so by knowing this information we knew we had to come out with an original ident that shows all their qualities that appeal to their audience of teenagers and young adults between the ages of 16-24 years old so they can relate and want to carry on watching or starting watching programmes shown on E4. 

We chose to go with the style of claymation because we believed it would give us the advantage of being able to make whatever we wanted with ease enabling us to work quick and experiment more. We also thought it would create a surreal but original theme to it. 

After researching more about E4 and its target audience we then began illustrating several ideas making them into storyboards to see which was most successful in identifying the qualities of E4. Out of all the ideas we came up with we decided the best one was the idea of selfie taking because we know this is extremely popular within their target audience as they are frequent users of social media sites which will relate to them making it appealing. The Characters we made out of plasticine for our selfie idea we decide to make as funny and as random as we could such as an octopus with human features and an old man picking his nose because that shows off the randomness of E4, we also chose to make one character smoke because their target audience is known for being rebellious and another lifting weights because their target audience is obsessed with going to the gym so we thought this would relate to them further making them feel intrigued and amused giving them a feeling of having a relationship with E4. 

We took many shoots to ensure our advertisement animation with the best we could possibly make it in the time given and began editing it by putting the frames together on Premiere and included funny sound effects to add to the humour. when we were happy with the animation we then showed it to an audience of which we got feedback from to see how successful our clip was. After we got feedback we found out that it was mainly really positive because everyone understood the selfie taking and the humour behind it and the characters so we felt we communicated well with the target audience and related well with the E4 qualities. The audience told us they particularly liked how creative and original we made the characters but they felt they could have been slightly more professional because a few had marks such as finger prints and dirty on but overall they felt the handmade claymation was a good idea. I believe this was because it adds friendly and funny aspect to the animation more than if it was made another way. although they understood the relation of the selfie taking they felt it was the least successful part of it because if was as clear as it could of been as it was very difficult to make it seem as if the plasticine model was holding the camera i feel we could have made it clearer by possibly introducing a selfie stick so more would be in the shot instead of having to squeeze the characters and set in. The audience feedback shows they also liked to sound effects because they were funny making them laugh but they did feel they were bait loud and hard on the ears for some people, we were aware of this in the editing of the animation but we felt with the sound effects it was too simple and dull so I'm happy that we decided to keep them in the end. 

The feedback questionnaire was to see what the target audience felt about out animation looking at aspects like quality, detail and impact of the advert whether it met our intention of amusing them and giving off the theme behind E4. I feel it was relatively successful by the feedback I feel we could have made it better if we had more time and if we didn't make some of the mistakes on the way but as a whole I think our E4 advertisement animation was very successful due to our amusing and relating to the target audience and I feel it reflects E4 really well because of the humour and randomness we used for example the octopus slapping the camera holder, the old man picking his nose, the character smoking, the camera holder kissing the E4 logo and finally the weight lifter picking up the E4 logo at the end which gets every character adding to the friendliness of E4 and making the audience feel theres friendship behind E4 further appealing so they feel the need to carry on or start watching programmes on E4.

Research

E4 is included in the Channel 4 network, its a TV channel which has a target audience of teenagers and young adults aged between 16-24. E4 is a known for its humorous and original programmes it shows like The inbetweeners, Skins and misfits which are extremely popular and well known through their target audience. They also show a more mature section of programmes such as RudeTube which is an adult version of You've been framed, Made in Chelsea which is about young wealthy Londoners causing drama and they have a the repeated soap Hollyoaks from Channel 4 which mainly uses actors and actresses in the target audience so its much more relatable and interesting. But around 75% of their programmes showed are from the U.S for example Brooklyn 99 and The Big Bang Theory which have shown to be very liked throughout their audience. 

E4 see their target audience as "young, upmarket, cutting edge, fashion conscious, sociable, connected". They are particularly popular with students and young women and because of this they use a lot of social media like Facebook and twitter to communicate with their audience even more. They have also collaborated with a cinema company to make 'Slackers Clubs' which is for students where they will screen their shows and give stuff away and they will use a student cartoon for them to click on their website and an animated ident for the Big Thursdays promotion for their weekly night of U.S comedies which shows us they already know their audience likes animation.

For branding companies who are thinking of advertising E4, they describe themselves as having an "eccentric and witty persona and strong branding that makes it a massive talking point" meaning that any ident must suit and fit this image which we will try our best in doing so.

Stop motion animation

Stop motion animation is a technique to make animation by physically altering objects in the frame in small movements for each individual photo creating the illusion that it is moving when the frames are put together and played in a continuous sequence. In stop motion animation you can use 3D objects or flat materials such as drawings. The amount of frames used per second and how much you were to move it changes how smooth the animation would appear for example if you were to move a toy car to smaller the movement and faster the frame the more realistic and smooth it will be.

There are many different types of stop motion animation such as claymation, pixillation, object animation and puppet animation. these can all be used for more than just small animation clips, they have been used to make adverts, idents, music videos and information videos which have seemed to be very successful.

Stop motion animation has been around since the dawn of cinema. the first known stop motion film documented was created by Albert E Smith and J Stuart Blackton in 1897 called "The Humpty Dumpty Circus" which they used toy animals and circus toys to create the illusion of them coming to life. Sadly the film itself is now lost.

The earliest existing film was made by Thomas Edison and Edwin Porter called "Fun in a Bakery" in 1902. They created the stop motion element by using actors sculpting a piece of dough into a face shown on screen they then stopped filming and sculpted a different face out of the dough out of shot then they started filming again and repeated this several times.

The first direct manipulation animation was produced also by Thomas Edison called "Humorous Phases of funny faces" in 1906 he made this by sampling drawing on a blackboard using chalk.

A French film made in 1908 called "Fantasmagorie" was the first known stop motion film that was fully animated. Of which it used 700 photographs of separate drawings.

King Kong was the most well known stop motion animation from the early days of Hollywood which used 24 frames per second. It was created by Ray Harryhausen in 1933 where it was a puppet used for the main character of the gorilla and to create various special effects which he also tried out for his movie called "The Lost World" in 1925.

In the 1950s an new technique called "Dynamation" which mixed stop motion animation and live action was used to create the fight scene in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. 

Stop motion techniques didn't change a lot until the 1980s when the invention of Go-motion which mixed stop motion with computer aided animation. Computer based animation (CGI) is increasingly popular due to its ease and speed but stop motion is still popular with children and people experimenting making their own videos for blogs and youtube thanks to Ardman's claymation work maintaining interest. The most successful stop motion animation movie to this day was Ardman's movie Chicken Run. 

The first all stop motion 3D feature came out in 2009

Object animation

Object animation was the very first type of stop motion animation and by far one of the easiest. Its made by the movement of objects instead of clay, puppets and drawings. They do this by taking a photograph of the object then move it and photograph again which they would repeat until satisfied with the movement.

It is one of the easiest forms of stop motion but it is also one of the most time consuming as it becomes extremely complex when you are using multiple objects in which you try link together and to create different events for. A good example of object animation is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhe9T3Eitkg

Claymation

Claymation is a technique of which you use clay or plasticine to create the background and characters. This is a more effective way of making more fluent movements because of the way its easy to move every part of clay or plasticine but the problem with claymation is that when sculpting or moving the characters and objects its easy to leave marks such as fingerprints and the material can get dirty not giving it the smoothest finish. 

In the production of claymation 12 frames would equal one second which means if you were to create a movement such as a character waving you would move its arm slightly that on the 12th frame the movement would be complete. A great example of claymation would be Wallace and Gromit "The Wrong Trousers"

(http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1szu1a_wallace-and-gromit-in-the-wrong-trousers_shortfilms) and pingu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2V7Hjqis1Y)

Puppet animation

Puppet animation was made through the use of object animation but instead with puppets or figures this is to introduce human aspects such as features and movement. The use of puppets makes the movement of sections much easier per frame creating a more life like animation.

Great example of puppet animation would be the films The Cameraman's Revenge in 1912 and L'Le Roman de Renard by the Russian animator Ladislas Starewitch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIC0Sb6pLvI 

Puppet animation is used a lot in children cartoons as the characters used are more interesting and humorous to them.

Pixellation

Pixellation is another type of stop motion animation which uses photographic images of actors or models posing instead of puppet animation and claymation characters for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4dx42YzQCE

Pixellation is much harder to make into a film because the actors have to make sure they only move to smallest bit and hold still to ensure that the frames link together properly and smoothly so there is not much noticeable difference between each still frame. Pixellation images are more realistic and film like but it still ables you to play around with the background and props to create a more surreal feeling to the animation. 

in 1905, one of the first examples of pixellation was in animation called "El Hotel Electrico" this also uses object animation.