Initial Sequence Ideas

As our design process for the graphics is nearly finished we started looking at how we would implement these into our OTS sequence and how it would play. We created some quick initial ideas and roughly assembled them. The next step will be choosing our final idea, recreating it as a final draft before turning it into the animation.

Barnaby and Hazel - idea 1 from Hannah C on Vimeo.

Barnaby and Hazel - idea 2 from Hannah on Vimeo.

Title Logo

Me and Hannah analysed the design and typography of some existing Title Logos. The original scan can be found on her blog here. We found a few common and successful features in the existing logos, for example the incorporation of parts of the characters into the logo to make them more recognisable. From this we created our first logo: 

I used Adobe Illustrator to make this, using the anchor points made creating the two tails easier, which I imported from my previous Illustrator files of the character parts. The ampersand is a light blue color, we did this to try and find a midway point between the two character and word colours that would fit in with the scheme.

Market Research

Our target audience, being so young are harder to access and extract information from, although not impossible. Another way to reach our audience is through their parents or guardians; not only to they regulate what their children watch but they can also see their reactions to different shows. Me and Hannah sent out a questionnaire to a group of parents of our target audience. The questionnaire can be found here and the results are on her blog here. From the results, we can deduce some things. Firstly that we have used very popular influences for our programme (Peppa pig and style of Charlie and Lola). Also that the channel 'Cbeebies' is a strong choice of channel to exhibit on as this was the favourite channel (also it is on freeview, as well as more expensive television packages) and to attempt to screen our show in morning and afternoon. Also, from verbal feedback gained from parents of the children, the child is most drawn to a magazine if it has toy(s) attached to the front as is largely a picture based front cover. 

First Animation Test Review

I recently created my first animation test using Adobe Flash as our final peice will be animated and we are yet to decide from the many methods of animation which we are going to use. Flash proved to be a worthy comptetitor and although it had a harsh learning curve and took me a while to get used to the controls and getting to programme to produce the outcome that I was picturing in my head. The outcome was of a very good quality and has flexible settings to control the specifications of the final product such as; dimensions, which gives me an easy way to test animations without exporting them to full size, but also maxamise the quality for the final product, as with framerate and quality settings, file type customisablity also ensures that I can export to any platform and distribute it easyily. The short animation I produced was very short and was not to my best ability as I was only recently aquainted with the programme, yet, it was still of high quality therefor I know that with more time and mroe knowledge put into it, this method could have an exellent outcome. So overall Flash is definatley a strong option to consider and I'll be doing further tests with this programme to familiarise myself with it.

First Animation Test

Analysis of existing products and influences

When deciding the main structure of our OTS we looked at many different opening sequences and the different styles that were out there and that were successful. 'Bagpuss' is a personal favourite of mine from my child hood and we especially liked the voiceover style in it; the introduction of the characters, the setting and the situation. This is one of our style models and one of our influences for our piece.

Our music style we want to be very simple, similar to that of 'Bagpuss', we want to combine it with the more modern style of the music heard in the background of this 'Peppa Pig' intro. We want to find a tempo between the two and a simple but modern melodic tune to have behind our voice over. More detail on the music on Hannah's blog here.

After previously looking at all the different kinds of animation used in children's TV programmes we decided to go for a more simplistic look, with simple block colours similar to in this 'Humf' intro. We also decided to use lighter, more diluted colours in our piece rather than the bright colours in these trailers. We posted more detail about our animating style on Hannah's blog here.

Defining Target Audience

In our group we have decided that our target audience is going to be children of ages 1-4 and of both genders. We came to this conclusion through looking at the style of product we were interested in creating and similar existing pieces. We understand that viewers not in our specific target audience may watch the show, but it is important to have our target audience in mind when creating our product, so we are able to cater to suit their needs specifically. This is why we have chosen a quite small age range (1-4). We feel if we try to broaden this (e.g. 1 - 7) our audience will possibly have conflicting needs and we could therefore not meet the needs of all our audience members if they conflict heavily. We feel that trying to appeal to both genders however isn't such an issue. We looked at some examples of existing programmes and their target audiences which is posted over on her blog.

Brief Pitch

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Market Research: Show Format.

The 'format' of a show would be judged by 3 things, the target audience, the length of the episodes, and the level of interactivity. These key factors will determine how the show is read, which, as the creators is something we need to think about and be very aware of, Hannah has looked more deeply and explained this on her blog.

Product and Campaign Research

Product and Campaign Research

This is my presentation which I will being talking through to my class. I looked at the film 'Resident Evil: Afterlife' and its related website, poster and trailer to look at the advertising techniques that were used. The main thing I found with Resident Evil is that there is a lot of borrowed interest from Milla Jovovich as she is a popular actress in many demographics.

Feminism.

Feminism and the reputation of women is a subject that interests me and often comes up in my research for media, and so, over the course of this blog and throughout my posts Feminism and the reputation of women will be a subject I will be constantly referring too.

Representation and Feminism

While talking about Anchorage, Semiotics, Context etc, we touched upon the subject of representation as it is closely linked in with what we were looking at.
  The subject of 'Feminism' as it got called in our class discussion, although I think in this context it is more suitably referred to as the representation of women, is a large issue that has been around for a long time and is still to this day in conflict. In my opinion it stands simply like this; Men and women have the right to be fairly, equally and accurately represented in the media, people who think men should always be represented as identical or superior to women, are misogynists (although that word may be too extreme) and people who think women should always portrayed as identical or superior to men are misandarists. Although the argument goes far deeper than that. Looking at pieces of media throughout history we can see the progression of sexual equality and the representation of women:

In ancient greece the equality of women varied from city to city but it was extremely rare for women to be actually equal to men. Looking at the play 'Lysistrata', a greek comedy originally performed in 411 BCE we see the attitude to women;s equality represented. The plot of the play follows Lysistrata and the women of a greek civilisation as they try to stop the Peloponnesian War by denying their husbands sexual contact. Although this may seem to be a story in favour of women and giving them power, and mocking men for their primitive minds and reliance on sex, it is actually written to belittle women and mock the idea of women having power over men.

It was not until 1928 that women got the vote equal to men, representations of this time can be seen in media pieces set from as early as 1900, for example Mary Poppins, set in 1910 shows the character Mrs. Banks wearing a campaign sash for women's vote. Despite this giant turn in women's equality the representation of women in films had not strayed too far from tradition, with the first King Kong film portraying a classical example of a 'damsel in distress' in the form of young actress Ann Darrow. Over a decade later we start to see some examples of strong female characters (or traits within characters) for example 'A street care named Desire' shows Blanche, a more independent woman, but it also has another character, Stella, who is very much dependant on, and controlled by, her abusive husband Stan. Around the 40's and 50's women started to become noticeably more towards equality in terms of media business, with the likes of Lucille Ball and Ida Lupino.

In more recent years movies have seen many female protagonists and strong female characters. For example:

• 'Alice' In the 'Resident Evil' Films - Milla Jovovich
• 'Beatrix Kiddo' In 'Kill Bill' - Uma Thurman
• 'Lisbeth Salander' In 'Girl with the dragon tattoo' - Noomi Rapace / Rooney Mara

• 'Lara Croft' in 'Tomb Raider' - Angelina Jolie
• 'Evelyn Salt' in 'Salt' - Angelina Jolie

 Now I have nothing against these films at all, especially 'Resident Evil: Afterlife' which I thought was a spectacular film. But they all juxta-impose women into the traditional roles of men, bearing weapons and killing people in hollywood style violent action scenes, Which again I don't have a problem with, I just dont like the fact that It has been pushed to this by 'feminists' saying that a man cant be dominant over a woman, saving her life, killing the bad guys and hooking up with her in the end. But I say whats wrong with a bit of tradition? Whats wrong with a bit of chivalry? It's how science and evolution and all that has built us to be, men are stronger than women to protect them. Personally I like the traditional man-saving-woman format. But that doesn't mean that im sexist in any way. Secondly the men in these films are often portrayed as stereotypical shallow, vain, stupid pricks.



(Interesting Fact: The origin of the word 'actor' is dated to be over a century before that of 'actress')

More detail into 'Signs' + Anchorage.

In class we wound into conversation the portrayal of tattoos on women and their connotations, which lead into a discussion about feminism etc. This is a good example of a signifier as we found out it conveys a variety of thoughts to different people. Some signs, like tattoos on women have an array of different reactions and provokes many different thoughts, however some signifiers are less (although not completely) contested, such as the appearance of a gun in a Film-Noir style film, it has a strongly presented image of power, masculinity and danger. Although it is important to note that that the context of a signifier can drastically change its connotations, for example a gun in a blockbuster hollywood movie has less impact than that of a Film-Noir piece.
  Every sign, denotation and connotation all come together to create the Anchorage of a piece of media, essentially summing up its meaning mode of adress.

Semiotics, Semiology.

Today we looked into semiotics and semiology, a way of approaching a piece of media, we looked at a series of portrait images, separated into male and female, we annotated the images with any words we could think of relating to the pictures. As a group we then talked about why we thought the words were related to the images which brought us to talk about signs and signifiers, the basis of semiotics; a sign is something within a picture, film or nearly any piece of media which portrays a certain image, provokes a certain thought or emotion or has a meaning beyond its denotations. Denotations are observations about a piece of media, e.g. 'The picture contains a woman', whereas Connotations are the ideas, meanings, feelings or deeper insights into a piece of media, e.g. 'The woman looks distressed'.
Here is a very simple and basic example of connoting and denoting an image.

The type of 'signs' which would be looked for in a piece of media are; colours and the contrast of colours, characters, background, framing, use of editing and enhancing etc. Often the most obvious and striking sign is the overall colour of the piece of media, it can change and control the media and its overall feel, for example if an image is predominantly red then it signifies anger, passion, lover, romance or danger, whereas a white image symbolises purity, peace, calm, empty, clear.