Stop Motion Animation Advert: Research

Stop Motion Animation Advert: Research

Brief: In groups we have to create a short 1 minute advert or TV ident using the medium of stop motion animation.
Initial Ideas: First of all we had to decide if we wanted to do a TV ident or an advert, we felt it would be better to do an advert because there are so many different products that we could advertise. We decided we wanted to create something with food, our first idea was to use heinz beans as our product. We could have aniamted them coming out of the can on there own and pouring themselves onto the plate however this food product may loose their colour over a few days so we decided to change the product to sweets.



Target Audience: The key target audience that we are looking into is children from the age of 2 - 11 because we feel the theme of jelly beans would mostly appeal to that age range. The channel Nickelodeon would be perfect to show our advert on because their programmes are aimed at children in  our age range. I think we can be more creative by aiming our product at children because they have a larger imagination than an adult audience. Lots of different things can be done by using jelly beans because they are easy to move about and also the colours may appeal to the young target audience.  

We then decided to change our target audience to people of our age becuase we felt we could relate to them more and we would be more clued up about what sort of things they like seeing in an advert. We thought a good channel to screen our advert on would be E4 becuase the target audience for their channel is 16 - 34 which is perfect for our intended audience.
This is what E4 said about their target audience:

Through research, we know that E4 viewers are predominantly young and upmarket, but theyre also fashion conscious, sociable, connected, heavy internet users, they love going out and tend to use advertising as one of their many information sources. They are also likely to be opinion formers and more likely to talk about brands and convince them to try them out.
Sourced from: http://www.channel4sales.com/platforms/E4 

This is from the E4 website, it explains their target audience and shows how our product would fit nicely into their channel.

 Before coming up with our main idea we needed to interview our target audience and get ideas from them to see what they thought about a stop motion animation based around sweets. The questions we asked them were:


Focus Group:


Do you remember any sweet adverts?

If yes, why do you remeber these adverts?

If you were directing a sweet advert what would your ideas be?

What keeps you engaged watching adverts?

Have you seen any stop motion advertisement?

If so, what did you like about it?

If you were directing an advert for young adults what would be your ideas?




Conclusion:
By carrying out this research we found out that no-one had remebered any Smarite adverts, the main sweet adverts that they remembered were the Cadburys, Skittles and Haribo ones. We want to create a smarties advert that can become memorable to our target audience. We asked our focus group why they found these adverts so memorable and we found out it was because they had either a good jingle, they were funny or it was very colourful. This proves that the music put together with the film needs to be just as good because it can make an advert more fun as well as memerable. Also we plan to make our advert very colourful so it becomes eye catching to our target audience. The main reason our focus group watch the adverts is because of the programme that follows it, we want to try and get our target audience watching our advert because it is fun and not just because there is a programme on after it. We found that only one person in our focus group remembered or had seen a stop motion animation advert before, this was very surprising as many adverts use this as their medium. We then asked what they would include in a stop motion animation advert targeted at their age group. The main ideas were they would make it as colourful as possible, use a jingle, possibly add humour and put someone who we can idolise into the film. These ideas will help us in the creation of our project and also help develop our ideas.


Stop Motion Style:
We have chosen to do a mix of pixilation stop motion animation where actuall people are used to animate a scene and object aniamtion where we are going to animate the Smarties. This is so there is a variety of diffeerent styles of animation so it becomes more interesting the the audience and it shows off our range of skills in animating with two styles. The two types of animation will help to tell our story because someone buys the Smarties before we actually animate them.

I looked at an article to help me understand what pixilation aniamtion is, here is the link: http://www.the-flying-animator.com/pixilation.html
This article helped me to fully understand what pixilation is and why it is used, I think it will fit well into our animation.

I also looks at some online guides that helped me to understand what needs to be included in the advert to make it memorable. Click on the link below to see the guide that I looked at during the research stage-
                                   http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/44226
I learnt from this guide that even though you have a small budget you can still make a memorable and original advert that outshines the high budget adverts if there is enough imagination.

I also looked into programmes aired on the E4 channel because I felt I needed to get a better understanding of what type of programmes they air on their channel so I could get more ideas about the style of channel. Hollyoaks is a popular soap styled programme on E4 which has a very colourful and youthful opening sequence similar to what we want our advert to be like. Here is the link to an episode of hollyoaks that I watched-
                             http://www.channel4.com/programmes/hollyoaks/4od
I noticed that there are a lot of young people featured in the programme which is good because our target audience is people of our age. People in our focus group said they watch adverts because of the programme that followed after, therefore if our target audience are watching programmes such as Hollyoaks they will view our advert.




Another programme on the E4 channel is Rude Tube, it is an entertainment show that broadcasts peoples videos from youtube that have been a huge succes and count down to the number one video with the most views. Here is a short clip of Rude Tube-


I think Rude Tube is again for people of our target audience because it is very entertaining however not for children because it sometimes shows rude clips that may not be suitable for a younger audience.