Evaluation of stop motion e-sting.

(read through and relate more to the brief ie what we could and couldn't do. also talk about target audience more and mention demographics and psychographics)


To review my animation I will produce a written report as I feel this will be the way in which I am most able to effectively evaluate the animations achievements and short coming in a concise and efficient way. It will also allow me to go more into detail than an oral presentation would, which may require a more vague description because of wanting to remain unambiguous.

Once our animations were complete we chose to distribute our work on the streaming site YouTube. This was the obvious method as it offered us the chance to reach the biggest audience we could, as well as the fact it is an easy and simple way of displaying work to the public. We also displayed our work in college, screening to to our fellow peers who then gave us constructive criticism via the YouTube comments seen here.

This was an effective way to gain an immediate response from our audience that had the benefit of giving us that immediate gut feeling about the film. As we can see the majority of the feed back was very positive with people saying they really enjoyed the concept of the idea and that the movement of the character in particular was very good. Our negative comments were mostly about some of the lighting which  believe would have been due to slightly different lighting levels of the location we filmed on rather than errors with the camera.
We also created a questionnaire to distribute on social media sites and to email people as to acquire feedback from the public. The questionnaire we devised was designed to find out what audience most affiliated and liked the sting, if the audience were able to identify the genre, narrative, and style, and also whether they felt the sting was technically up to rate in regards to the smoothness and lighting. Our feedback was mostly positive and this was especially pleasing as the people reviewing us were the public, and so would be a lot more harsh if they felt there were mistakes.

The first two questions asked the audience their age and gender, this was as both could influence the results we receive from the other more telling questions, and it would also be interesting to see what age groups and genders were most interested in the film. In regards to gender we got a reasonably even amount of feed back from both male and female participants. However in regards to the age groups that responded our participants were almost exclusively from the 18-24 group, presumably this was because the questionnaire was emailed to people we know, and therefore the majority of respondents were our friends of similar ages. We did however gain some answers from the other age groups, which we hypothesise were probably YouTube viewers as it was exposed to a wider age ranged audience. 

Question 3 asked participants what genre they felt most accuracy described our animation. Our original idea for our sting was that it should contain some amount of humour, as this reflected the many of real e-stings we saw which were humorous in nature. Pleasingly the majority of our participants identified the sting as being part of the comedy genre. Another reason we felt using humour was a good idea is because people become more engaged if they are entertained and we think it worked well.

 We featured a comment section to ascertain exactly what each individual found funny about our sting. It also explains why 2 people suggested it was action and 1 person suggested it had more of an adventure genre and this is important as it suggests amendments we could make in order to improve it.  The comments also show the narrative was understood and that the audience were able to correctly identify the plot, which suggests we were able to convey a narrative in a short space of time that is engaging.

This question was perhaps slightly more aimed at those with some background knowledge in animation, asking whether they were able to identify which type of animation it was. However it was perhaps obviously Lego animation due to the Lego character. There was one anomalous response which suggested it was a claymation however this could be due to the use of blu tac or the paint at the end which may have been mistaken for clay.

Question 6

This question was designed to find out whether the audience could correctly identify what the character was, as him being an artist was vital to the story to give it context. It also asked what age they felt the character was, and the gender. 

The audience were able to identify the character as an artist/ painter and decorator, which for the most part was what we had planned and decided to make him. The name of the e-sting was also "The Artist" which may have hinted at this.

Asking what age they though the character was helped us understand how an audience would interpret the character. We hadn't planned on there being any set age for the character, and the responses we got ranged from the 20-40 range with most being at the latter end. This may be due to peoples stereo typical views of artists in general, however I personally happy we got a range of answers, as this meant each individual had their own personal ideas about the character.

In our original planning the character was to be a male artist, this tied in with the artist losing his temper and being a grumpy frustrated man at the end, stereotype that can be humorous. All participants were able to identify the character as male meaning we designed our character well.

This question was really to ascertain whether the technical and precise movements required to make animation smooth were done well enough, in other terms the frame rate. Obviously animations aren't supposed to be as smooth as real life, however it was important that we captured real and in this case human movements. The results we got back were very interesting and on the whole positive with 81% saying they the animation was smooth, however 5 of our participants told use it wasn't. This suggests some improvement was needed and also suggests to us certain things we could change to achieve a smoother animation.

This question was designed to help us figure what was good about the sting and what wasn't, which would allow us to improve on the bits that weren't as good. The image above shows the positive comments and why participants felt they added to the sting. The part that seemed to be most liked was the revealing of the E4 logo at the end of the sting, which also happened to be what took most time to capture. it was made to seem as if the logo was emerging through mess of paint. Admittedly this part was easier to shoot than the rest of sting, as were working with still canvass on the floor, as opposed to an upright canvas that had been secured with not so sturdy masking tape. However it still took a long time to shoot and so these comments saying it was done well are very positive bit of feedback.

Also rewarded was the originality of the idea itself, which again was very pleasing as this meant the sting may possibly stand out and therefore be remembered by audiences. We also felt this way as prior to coming up with our own sting we analysed already existing ones, and there wasn't anything on the same lines as our own. One idea we did borrow however still execute in our own way was the slow revealing of the E4 logo.

This shows what people didn't like about the sting and why. The most frequent dislike is also one that I share and is to do with the lighting. In the first sequences there are moving shadows that are visible on the canvas, and this was due to ambient light and different movements that were going on in the class we were filming in, a way to improve this would have been to film when the class was empty, however this wasn't really possible to due the time frame we were working with. We also tried using different filters on premier pro to make the shadows and lighting look better which worked, however couldn't completely negate any shadows without ruining the lighting on the whole.

This question was perhaps answered in the "what do you like section" however at the time we weren't aware it would be one of the major positives, so we felt it necessary to ask whether people felt the idea was unique. In correlation to previous feedback all but one person said they felt the idea was unique, which is obviously a major positive as it sets it apart from any other stings. The sting was also created in part to be entered in to a competition so originality was important.

We also wanted to know exactly was they felt was unique about the the sting. The responses above mostly stated that they hadn't seen any like it before as mentioned previously which was a very positive thing as this makes it stand out, and we had purposely done research and made sure our idea wasn't too similar to any others. Another was that it combined both pain and Lego animation together which was different to most, and it was also said that our characters realistic movement gave him a character made it stand out.

This was simply to find out whether we had created a media text that could be identified as a channel ident- e-sting. Thankfully 100% of people said it was easily identifiable as an ident. This is important as it suggest our work isn't of ambiguous genre or purpose. Also notable is that most of our participants are around the 18-2 age the same age group E4 is aimed at.

Evaluating the project

When creating our e-sting we came across a few obstacles that had to be dealt with, one of the biggest being that the materials we were using were fragile and broke easily. We began to construct the ladder with cotton bud sticks sellotaped , however this was unstable and didn't look good when we began filming, and fixing this took a lot of time. The pre-production work also became difficult with regards to meeting the deadline. We tried then to amend our design of the ladder using cotton buds, however cutting the tips off to make it look more realistic and instead of using tape, we used blu tack as this was more effective and allowed us to fix the ladder in place on the floor

Our next issue was fixing the camera and canvass in place, as keeping the same position for each shot was vital in order to create a smooth picture. However we shared a classroom and on several occasions our tape markers had been moved either by cleaners or other students, resulting in us having to find the correct position and marking it again, a very time consuming process. We also had the issue of filming on a low down surface thus meaning we were unable to use a tripod as none would lower to the required height, resulting in us having to use a box and mark where the box was and where the camera was on that box. These issues took up a lot of our filming time, however we did manage to stick to the deadline for filming.

The problems we faced while editing mainly were to do with certain shots we had got had shadows that moved positions due to certain extraneous factors in the class room like people moving around behind us. To remove these we had to place colour correction and fix the RGB setting to make these less prominent. |Also two of our images had an orange tint to them, to amend this we used filters and also altered the colour of our other images to make the colour and shading the same throughout. Also staying with in the 10 second limit was also a hard due to the amount of footage we had, after ordering every frame we actually had around 15 seconds worth of footage, which resulted in us having to cut certain parts of the sting. The original plan for our e-sting  was for the the artist to kick the canvas resulting in it falling over and the paint falling off to reveal the E4 logo, however because we ran over time we had to think about which part we could condense to have the same effect. We decided to cut the frames of the board falling over, these frames were also quite jumpy so we thought it was best to remove these and just get the character to kick the board and then the paint fall off from that action and reveal the E4 logo, this took our e-sting down to 13 seconds. Therefore we had to cut a few other frames out that could be removed, we took out and made shorter the part where the character was frustrated and threw his hands in the air, this eventually took it down to 10.1 seconds.


The timing for filming was from the 18th of November to the 25th of November, through the setbacks of the constraints we still managed to keep the the deadline for pre-production, filming and editing. However the pre-production did take the most time because of the materials we used and collecting the paint as well to paint the canvas and paint over the masking tape, there was pre-production happening throughout some of the filming because of the different parts of the story that were being filmed. for example the canvas had to be plain to begin with, therefore we couldn't paint the canvas until we were up to that point of filming, we then had to check over the images to check that they were completed before we painted the canvas, as once painted we could not go back and redo any shots in front of the plain canvas.

In regards to legal constraints we faced  the sound track was a major one as we were only allowed to use music that was from a pre selected set of tracks chosen by E4 due to copyright laws and this also ensured any music used would sound similar to that already featuring in existing e-stings. E4's guidelines stipulated that we had to use their soundbites for the animation and so this meant our creative freedom was limited slightly. If we had used music that wasn't from the selection of soundbites our e-sting wouldn't have been valid for entry.
 The reason for the E-sting to follow these guidelines on the soundtrack is because once submitted the E-sting is therefore part of the E4 copyright protection, therefore making it illegal for anyone to copy the work you have produced and re-submit it. It also again identifies E4 as a brand which is obviously the purpose of an E-sting. below are the 'House Rules' for which an E-sting must adhere to.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/community/articles/all/upload-rules

Here we see the house rules stipulate that any work submitted must be your own work and not that of another persons nor can it be copied or feature anyone else's material without permission. This is a guideline that ensures E4 abide by legal copyright law and prevents them from being subject to copyright infringement claims. Below you can see the E4 guidelines in relation to copy right infringement which covers anything from copying, distributing or making profit of anyone else's ideas no matter how substantial the piece of work.

For our animation we had to be aware of the copyright law and also research on YouTube and the E4 E-sting website itself, to watch various E-stings that had already been made to get inspiration, but to also be aware of ideas that had already been made. This included using the same title, same story line, the music was not as much of an issue because all E-stings were specified to use music provided. The idea of our E-sting came from seeing a recurring theme of the revealing of the E4 logo, and to think about how we could do it, with a clear story line told within 10 seconds. The legal considerations restricted us from re-creating someones idea and even producing it with different materials, if it was one that already exists and you submitted that, it would be an ultimate disqualification.