Ident Research

Ident Research

Background Info -

My group focused on a very successful channel called E4. It was launched 8th January 2001 and broadcasted throughout the United Kingdom. Along with the main E4 channel, there is also E4+1 where you can catch up an hour later, and 4oD is their official website where episodes can be re-watched at any time.E4 has its own look- purple, white logo. This image is eye catching, modern and iconic.

Their advertising techniques, upbeat music, and their original Idents, are the most recognised way of promotion to the target audience of 15-35.

Research into E4 Idents:

We will be creating a TV ident for the channel E4. It is an entertainment channel aimed at people aged 15-35. I know this because the theme of the channel and the programs shown are suitable for an audience of that age group. The theme f the channel is comedy and entertainment. Some of the programmes that are shown on the channel include: Scrubs, Misfits, The Big Bang Theory, Hollyoaks and The Inbetweeners.

We looked at a range of E4's different Idents-from old to new.

The E4 channel idents are very unique. They are quite surreal and random, this is because that appeals to the target audience, the way they are set out make them interesting to my age group.

We watched some of the idents that are featured on E4's channel, such as the one above, to give us some inspiration as to the themes of the idents. The ident that we watched The themes we saw in the idents are quite obvious; they all have a lot of purple in them, there is a yellow clay figure that is in them, the objects in the scene are consistent with the background and there is meant to be a 'random' theme.

Focus Group -

We filmed a focus group so that we could gein ideas and inspiration for our ident based on ones that are already shown on the channel.

These are the questions that asked to the Focus Group:

What do you think about the E4 Channel Idents?

Who do you think the channel is aimed at?

What do you think the themes are for the ident?

Which programs do you like that are aired on E4?

What would you want to see in an ident for this channel?

What would be in the ident if you were making one for the channel?

What kind of music would you play in your ident?

What do you think is being shown by the ident?

Do you understand what is being shown in the ident?

From this, we have decided that our ident will involve the colour purple, the clay gushing out of objects and the theme of randomness. This will fit in with the current idents shown on the channel and our feedback from the focus group.

Our research has helped us paint a solid idea about what our ident should include.

Style and Technique -

We will be using clay-mation and object animation for the majority of the ident, it will be three quarters stop motion and one quartrer filmed.

We also need to make sure that our ident is quirky, fun and inticing like the other e4 idents so it suits the target audience and it keeps them interested.

Sources of Information

http://www.e4.com/estings/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animation

Production Diary, Evaluation and Feedback

Production Diary

This is my group's stop motion Ident for the channel E4, it is 60 seconds long and has an original soundtrack consisting of two songs mixed together; Flat Beat by Mr Oizo and Edn (remix) by Mr Oizo.

Production Diary
1 day before filming:

• Before we started filming , we made sure that we had all the props needed for the ident and bought aspects we needed, like the toy soldiers and the spray paint that I used to paint them different colours that I bought in a department store.  The others in my group went and bought things that would also be needed such as purple paper to give the goo effect, a purple bucket and purple plasticine.
• Dividing the objects that needed to be bought between the other members of my group made it a lot easier so we could all focus on other things as well as getting the props.

Filming Day:

• During the first day of filming for our ident, we managed to get the video aspect completed.
• I was the actor in this section of production, while Dorna was the camerawoman and she filmed me acting and Katie directed by giving constructive criticisms and input towards the frames being shot to make it look the best we could.  This worked well as I knew exactly what I was meant to do and how I could improve my actions because Katie and Dorna gave me feedback to make it look more fluid or realistic when I was meant to be running from someone.
• As Dorna was the one who took on the responsibility of drawing up the storyboards, we decided that she should help Katie direct as she knew how the actions should be played out and what I should be doing.
• We filmed many takes of the same shot to make sure when it came down to editing, we could choose the perfect shot to add to the Ident and make it look a lot better.
• A problem that arose during the first day of filming was that the weather was quite bad.  The rain meant we could not start the stop motion aspects  of the Ident as rain drops would cover the bucket slowly which would evidently show up in the frames and it would ruin the continuity.  This meant that shooting the Stop Motion task would have to come later in the week.  Something we could have done to help combat this would be to check the weather forecast each day to check if the forecast was good.
• Some of the camera angles and shots shown in the storyboards did not make it onto our Ident.  Although we shot all of them, some didn't look as good as they did in the storyboards or what we thought it would hopefully look like so we cut them out to give the overall effect a much more fluid view.

• We chose to set the ident in a parking lot as it is a normal place that would become part of the 'E4 world', much like other idents we have seen. For instance;

This ident is set in a normal location, in this case a bedroom and it becomes surreal and crazy after all of the E4 goo.

Parking Lot where the Ident would be set.

Day 2-3:

• Checking the weather forecast, we needed to continue shooting on a day in which it was not raining and it would fit in with all of our timetables.  We decided that we would do this on Thursday as we all had a total of 4 hours free to work on our Animation.
• In the meantime, we began editing the footage that we had so far, the video section of our ident at the start and to do more preparation and planning work for the stop motion section when we would have to go back to location and shoot.
• This was a great help as we later found out because it meant that we did not have to go back and edit this part and we could focus all our efforts solely on the stop motion side of the ident.

Day 5:

• On day 5 we were ready to continue filming and start the stop motion section of our Ident. Grabbing a SLR and a Tripod for the photography, we headed down to the location. The weather looked much better than it had done on Monday so we knew we would be able to film today and we would have no trouble with rain.
• Me and Katie were given both Camera man and Director when shooting this while Dorna was the animator, she was moving the objects.
• The shooting was a success as we managed to get a fair chunk of the ident done.
• The Problems that we faced were the movement of the leaves around the bucket as it started to move. This was due to Dorna stepping near to the bucket and disrupting the leaves.  However, when we later played it back and changed the duration of each frame on final cut pro, we noticed that it gave the whole bucket and its movements emphasis as if it was moving the leaves.

Day 6:

• We decided that we could no longer take the shots outside at our location in the parking lot any more because it would've been difficult to shoot the plasticine scene's on the ground as bits of dirt stick to it which would show on the camera and also we had to walk 2 minutes there and back with the equipment  severely shortening the amount of time we had to film.  So on day 6, we decided to shoot inside the Mac suite at the college.
• This worked because the last shot outside was zoomed in on the tissue paper and the background and the bucket would not be seen. The one problem with changing the location of the shooting was that we had issues with lighting changes.
• We managed to get a lot of the ident done, however we would need to meet up over the weekend to complete it in order to be able to promptly start editing on Monday.

Day 7:

• Going to Katie's house we finished our Ident.
• A problem that we faced when changing locations again, was the lighting change.  We would have to see what we could do on Monday when we were editing.

Feedback - 

After completing our Ident, we asked people about their thoughts towards our Ident.  Here is the feedback that we received:

What are your thoughts towards our Animation?

What part of our Ident did you enjoy watching the most?

Could you understand clearly what was going on in our Ident?

Did you like the soundtrack of our Ident?

Is the soundtrack catchy and memorable?

In what ways do you think we have incorporated E4's other Idents into our own?

What area's could we improve on?

Evaluation - 

When making this E4 Ident, we knew we had to be open minded as looking at previous E4 Idents we noticed that they were all original, unique and fun and this is what we hoped to achieve. When we first got this practical task me and my group were feeling confident with all of the ideas that we had come up with.  Working together, we decided what we would include in the ident and what we would not.  Overall, I think that our Ident is good, but it could be smoother and more adapted towards the ones shown on the channel.

Character, narrative and visual style:
The style in which we had to make our Ident in was very important because it had to not only reflect E4's personality, but it had to be creative like many of their Idents.  We succeeded in doing this by using toy soldiers and animating them to look like they were dancing.  This appeals to our target audience of the younger generation (15-35) because its fun, not taking things too seriously and is random.  The genre for our Ident is comedic so a wider range of people would also enjoy it.
We set out to create an Ident which showed a normal British location that E4's quirky and fun personality takes over.  We achieved this very well because we set our location in a normal parking lot- the main colours being grey, white and boring, dull colours.  The contrasting colour being the purple bucket-this focused the attention on it.  We've shown the 'takeover' by showing lots of colours like red, yellow, green, white and purple.  We chose to use those colours because not only are they colourful but we saw them used in previous Ident's shown on E4 and chose to also incorporate it into our own.

How successful? Techniques employed?
I think that our overall animation is very good.  We have created an Ident in the style of current E4 Idents.  Using clay-mation when using the purple plasticine was easier then we thought it would be.  We had to be careful when changing the plasticine that we did not leave finger prints on it and that we didn't get any dirt stuck to it as this would look very unprofessional.  We used object animation with the bucket, tissue paper and soldiers.  To create a successful stop motion animation, we had to make the movements of the objects very little before taking the frames.  This resulted in a smoother animation when the duration of each frame shown was reduced and played in succession.
The soundtrack that I mixed with two tracks, also sounded good and in sync when played with the animation, like the animation itself, the soundtrack was also

Feedback after Ident shown to Target Audience:
When we showed our target audience our Ident, they enjoyed it because they said it was creative and fun.  They also saw how we had incorporated E4;s style of work in to our own.  They mentioned something that we could of improved on was the lighting change between certain bits.  We fully agreed on this as we had to change our location from outdoors to indoors as we could not carry out some of our work outdoors because of the dirt on the floor and the wind.  Furthermore, they also mentioned how in the extreme close-ups of our Ident, which show the shots with the plasticine, could of been made more professional by smoothing the plasticine out before taking the frames as you can see cracks and some thumb prints- this makes the animation look a bit unthorough and unprofessional.

Strengths and weaknesses:
A strength that our animation had was that it was in sync with the beat in the music. This made it more realistic and was more enjoyable for the target audience to watch.  We also met a lot of the themes in our final product.  
Due to the Stop Motion section of our Ident not having any sound at the start, we had to find sound effects that were suitable.  A weakness that we faced was finding a suitable sound effect that seemed realistic when watching it.  We were successful in the end however we had to go through a lot of effects to gain the right one.


Production Team:

I think I worked quite well with my production team although we had our disagreements at times, we always came through with goo results.
Working in a group worked in a way very well in the sense that each person had a job to complete and the work could be distributed evenly so it would take less time to make.  However, working in a group also had its disadvantages as we would have our disagreements over what would look better for our Ident.  This came with an advantage however as we now had not only a vast number of ideas with different opinions and options to choose from, but we also gained experience on what it would be like to work with a production team and how to work well together.
When shooting, each of us had a task that we would change in between ourselves.  For example, I would be cameraman, Dorna would be animator and Katie would Direct.  We would swap these roles every once in a while so we could all experience each job and its responsibilities.

Pre-production stage:
Each person had a job to complete when carrying out our pre-production stage.    This helped a great deal as we could spend more time and effort on the smaller things that needed to be done.  Although we had a lot to do before the pre-production deadline, we managed to finish all of our work in time.
I had the task of completing the story-board, mood board, and character designs and drawings.  I was chosen to do these tasks because I was more the arty person in the group.

We also planned to meet up outside of college.  This was great because we completed our Ident so we could go to college and get straight to work on the editing.  This saved us a lot of time so we could spend the rest of our time in completing our other assignments.

How our animation compares to previous Idents:

When planning and creating our Ident, when watching it, we wanted the audience to know what channel this Ident was made for without seeing the logo of the channel.  We accomplished this very well because in current Idents, the main colour theme is purple.  We incorporated this into our won Ident by making the main colour purple as well.

Our Ident also is quirky and fun, much like E4's Idents.  It is randomly creative as the toy soldiers are dancing- you wouldn't see this any where else.  This reflects E4's personality because they don't take things too seriously.

Overall:

I think that overall, my group and I created a really good, fun animation for the channel E4.  I have learned a great deal about Stop-Motion Animation and what it is like to shoot it in terms of frames, camera angles (due to the workshops we had), deadlines and working well in a group and many more.  These skills help me to continue and greater my understanding of production and learning new things about Stop Motion.

Present Stop Motion Animations

Current Stop Motion Animation

Stop motion is still used in many different media's. It is still used in modern television, channel idents, computer games, music videos, Cinema, websites, advertisements and on mobile phones.

TV Stop Motion - 
Stop motion has had a fairly big influence on television, there are numerous successful programmes that are on TV. The most frequent style of stop-motion shown on tv is claymation. A very popular claymation series is 'Gumby', this is an american series which was created in 1955 by Art Clokey and has 233 episodes spanning 34 years (1955 - 1989).
Some good examples of stop motion animation on current TV are Pingu, Creature Comforts and A Town Called Panic. 

'A Town Called Panic' is a puppetoon series distributed by Aardman Animations and produced in Belgium by Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier for La Parti & Pic Pic André. It follows the everyday events of Cowboy, Indian and Horse in a small rural town as they go about their lives. Each episode is roughly 5 minutes long and is crudely animated: the characters are meant to resemble cheap toy figurines.

'Creature comforts' is a television series released in 2003. It was originally a 1989 British humorous animated short film about how animals feel about living in a zoo, featuring the voices of the British public "spoken" by the animals. It was created by Nick Park and Aardman Animations.

Pingu is another great example of modern day stop motion-animation, which is a series that started in 1986 and is still running today. This award-winning stop motion clay mated series was created by swiss animator Otmar Gutmann.

Channel Idents - 

Almost Every channel has an ident. A channel idents can vary between the channel, some even have more than one channel and some of these idents use stop motion animation. Some of the best channel idents that I have seen are from the channel E4.

E4's idents are unique as they are very surreal and they are very suited to their target audience. Another reason they are so good is that they have a competition for viewers to send in their own idents so a lot of the idents shown on the channel are viewer made.

Computer Games - 

Many different techniques are used to create computer games, these can include stop motion animation, using motion capture suits and cel (Standard) animation. Not many big, well know companies use stop motion in video games, they use cel animation and now lots of companies use motion capture suit for realistic movement. Some indie games use different techniques of animation, here are two I have found that use stop motion.

Voyager is an indie game created using stop motion of small wool figures. This is a small game for the iPad.

Cletus Clay is a game made entirely using claymation, this is a ver unique game as claymation is not often used to create video games.

Music Videos - 

Music videos can be of anything the artist wants the video to be, this means there are an extremely large variety of music videos out there and because of this, there are lots of different styles of video including a lot of stop motion videos. A very good video that utilises stop motion is the video for Delta Heavy's song 'Get By'.

Another very good stop motion video is by Benga with his video fr his song 'I Will Never Change'.

Peter Gabriel's video for his song 'Sledgehammer' is one of the first stop motion animation music videos. In this, he uses many different style of stop-motion animation which makes it very iconic.

Advertisements - 

There are lots of different adverts on modern TV and they are very varied. a very good example of this is Sony's advert for their Xperia phone.

Another good example is the Volkswagen "Think Blue. Symphony" advert, which uses some aspects of stop motion.

Stop motion animation all around us in the modern world of media, it is a popular method to give a unique effect to videos and create a certain style. It is a very good technique and will still be used for a long time.

Stop Motion Developers

Stop Motion Developers

Willis O'Brien - 

Willis Harold O'Brien was an Irish American Born in 1886 and he lived until November 8 1962. He was a motion picture special effects and stop motion animations pioneer, he 'was responsible for some of the best-known images in cinema history'. His most renowned work was on The Lost World, King Kong and Mighty Joe Young.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_H._O'Brien)

His work - 
The Lost World:

and one of his most well known films 
King Kong:












He had a unique style in which he combined the filming of live actors and stop motion models to come up with a very different style to what was shown at the time. With this method, he was able to create scenes where men fought great monsters; much like King Kong, by combining the two method of traditional film and stop motion. He was the main pioneer of this kind of model animation.

Ray Harryhausen - 

Ray Harryhausen was born in 1920 and is still alive, aged 92 years old. He is an American visual effects creator, writer and producer. He created a brand of stop motion animation which is known as 'Dynamation'. Some of his best work is in Mighty Joe Young (in collaboration with Willis O'Brien) and Jason and the Argonauts, in which is the famous scene where Jason s in a sword fight against 7 skeleton warriors.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Harryhausen)

His work - 

Mighty Joe Young:

and his more famous piece
Jason and the Argonauts:

Ray Harryhausen uses similar techniques to Willis O'Brien. The main technique used by Harryhausen is Dynamation, which is a type of model stop-motion animation which he created. He was one of the only animators to work in the field and he kept the technique alive with his inspiration from Willis O'Brien. With his work, Harryhausen tries to make it seem as if the models are not animated at all, as if they are real. He does this by making them interact with objects and the scene in the real world.

Jan Svankmajer -

Jan Svankmajer was born in 1934 and is still alive, aged 78. He is a Czech film maker and artist whose work spans several media. He is a self-labelled surrealist and he is now for his surreal animations and feature films, these have greatly influenced other artists such as Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Quay and many others. His best know works consist of the feature films Alice, Faust and Lunacy.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_%C5%A0vankmajer)

His Work - 
Alice :


and one of his more recent titles
Lunacy:

Jan Svankmajer has a very surreal style in his animation. His work has had great influence n other well known animators, like the Brother Quay, Terry Gilliam and many others. He uses claymation in a lot of his work. He likes creating clay masks of the face for his work, it helps to create his surreal style with faces being able to be squished and stretched unlike a normal face.