E-Sting Evaluation

For this evaluation I shall be writing a written report on the responses that we collated and how they will help us for future filming. 

When the questionnaire results came back I was surprised at how many of the results answered the questions correctly as people knew what stop motion animation was, but there were draw backs such as the noises that the characters made came across as annoying to some, this is something that we would take into account if we made it again because if the target audience didn't like the audio then we failed at meeting the brief in this regard. Also it seems that when we asked about the target audience the answers were absolutely what we wanted to hear as this was the target audience that we wanted to aim for so we were very happy with that. There was one response that caught my eye was one that someone said that they could see the table in one of the shots. This is again, something that i would take into consideration if i had to film something like this again. People also seemed to like the style of the animation as it was different and I quote 'pleasing to the eye'. Overall, of all the responses that we got, no one said that they didn't like it, which is encouraging because the constructive criticism the we were given has helped us to prepare for the next task, and be more weary of what is needed it a piece of media text.  

When we made the animation, we came across the rather large elephant in the room, which was copyright. Because we were using Lego we had to remove any trace of the LEGO brand so ended up painting the LEGO people white which worked well with the film Noir style. We also had to be careful with our budget as we only had £5, but we had to go slightly over because of the price of the paint and the postage for said paint. But the rest of the set we were able to make out  of resources that could be provided by the college.

We were given 6 lessons to meet our final deadline, but we were able to get the animation done with a couple of lessons so we could start editing  earlier, giving us more time to get everything done. This was useful as we had to go back and film a couple of frames as they were out of focus and our finished video was a bit short so we duplicated a few frames and filmed a few more to fit to our 10 second time frame. I think that i maybe a suitable candidate for working to a brief as we only made a couple of slip ups that could be amended easily and that we kept to the brief as well as we could. I personally might consider animation as a further career as i fully enjoyed making the animation and that I feel that it would be a viable career for myself.

We received feedback from our classmates and tutor as we put our video on you tube and we all watched all of the animations and then in the YouTube comments wrote feedback for everyone. The feedback for ours was very positive and constructive. For our E-Sting I feel that it went well and that we ended up with an animation that was very much as I had intended it to be when I originally thought of it. We managed to easily fill the 120 frames that we needed to, also as we used a DSLR camera all the frames were of good quality apart from a few that were blurry but we weren’t able to change them in time as we had already finish filming so had to leave them in. This would probably have been the only thing that I would’ve changed to make it look a bit better. Editing went well through-out but we did run into a few small problems such as some of the frames went missing but we were able to recover them quite easily. I had also wanted it to be in a Film Noir style but to also have the monster to still be in colour which we were able to achieve quite easily in Premier Pro. When we had finished with editing we had achieved the style that I wanted and the monster was still purple so was prominent in the animation and fit well with the brief. We also had to use music provided by E4, although there wasn’t much in the way of choice we still managed to find a piece that fit fairly well. When actually making the set and characters it took a while as we had to wait for some of the materials as we didn’t have them present at college so had to order them. In the meantime we made a backdrop on Photoshop that we could use, it was quite simple as we had to change all the colours when editing so it made that job easier. We did look for backdrops on google but couldn’t find one that fit well enough so we just made one instead. I supplied the Lego characters that I had to paint white as they would be the white in the E4 logo. Admittedly it did take a while to make the set and characters, which is what I would have improved if I had to do a task like this again

I feel that we met the requirements of the set brief as our animation fit very well with what was asked of us, more specifically that we made sure that the animation was exactly 10 seconds long and that it was appropriate for the TV. Also we didn't breach any copyright laws as we stayed within our restraints and made sue that nothing we had in it, had no logos etc. - we only used material the we had created ourselves or that which E4 had provided (the music and the E4 logo). The music that we used was copyright free as it was from the list of tracks that E4 had provided for people to use for the competition. And finally we tried our best to appeal to a large audience that would be watching the allocated TV channel - E4. This is a target that we think we met, but, there were some drawbacks as some people found the noises that the characters made, annoying, this is something that we would revisit if we were to send this off. Also one of the answers to the questions was that they could see the corner of the table which isn't really very professional and again something that would change. Looking at the content of the esting, I believe that the esting meets Ofcom standards - we have not caused any offence or included anything that would cause poor behavior in young people.