ANIMATION EVALUATION

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I am going to use a written report in order to review my work as it will be easier to refer back to and the information will be available, should I ever need to be able to view it again. This allows me to also go deeper into detail rather than an audio commentary or an oral presentation and also allow me to add different elements to the work like images and video to further give my points evidence. My BTEC ESting was exhibited through YouTube and a class screening. I have decided to distribute it through YouTube as it is free to use and is also very easy and quick to upload supported formats. This platform is also very easy to distribute to a large audience. This may also be bad for this however, as it has a large audience to view it, it also has a very saturated collection of videos on YouTube and if you don't have a large YouTube channel it is likely that your video will not be seen by a large audience. The class screening was a clever way to get feedback as after everyone had watched my ESting they all gave feedback both written and verbally. This YouTube video could have been seen by a larger audience if I were to share this throughout my other social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook or Snapchat.

I obtained feedback through using a feedback sheet during the class screening. Everyone was given a feedback sheet to write down their thoughts on the BTEC Estings. I also obtained feedback through surveys made on the website called "Survey Monkey" and asked a variety of questions linking to genre, audiences, content, theme etc. I sent this survey to some of my peers and got back 12 responses which I will use to reflect on. Personally, I thought that some of my ideas were very good however, I had not executed them as well as I had hoped. When recording the party scene, the camera only picked up every couple of frames of the strobe instead of every other frame so the flashing didn't come out as well as I had hoped. I wasn't too sure how to feel about the green-screen as it didn't go too well. If you are to look at the head area, it had an area where you could see through the head. This was due to bringing out the clip black areas in order to get a smooth green-screen however, it instead removed some of the head of the character from this clip. This also works really well in some areas too however, as some areas where it has made the lego pieces a little more transparent and looks like there are reflections of the background on the lego, when instead it is just a slight transparency.

Before creating the questionnaire I had to make sure the question that I used, followed the correct criteria for the feedback that I need from my stop motion animation. So I had to make sure I followed the bullet points that are shown above and also before making the questionnaire public, I had to make sure that the questions were fine by asking my peers to check them over and give it their approval for release. For my feedback I received, the general tone was rather positive as everyone liked it, however there was one person who didn't understand the narrative to the ESting. I asked my friends and peers from my class that fell under my main target audience of male 16-30 year olds, as well as trying to get a female perspective as well for my second target audience and these were my results from my Survey Monkey responses:

When I first saw these answer I was quite happy to see such positive reactions to my ESting as in my opinion it wasn't best I could do due to time constraints, but having that all the responses say yes makes my stop motion animation seem better than I thought it was at the end.

The response was good for this pretty much all of the people who answered the questionnaire where around the age of my target audience which was around 16-30, so these answer are perfect for the questionnaire and it was I design the ESting for as well.

This information is very good, as it shows me that its mainly my target audience is answer the questionnaire, which male, 16-30 and from the previous question I get that information and it allows me better feedback of my stop motion animation. But it would of been nice to see some feedback from female's view in order to get different perspectives of the video.

The information given is a bit repetitive and like the previous, I wouldn't of minded if there was a different number of job roles that answered in order to get a different perspective of the stop motion animation that I created. But I did target my video to student age range, as they are the majority that watch E4.

This is very good feedback for me, as it offers different answers of what they liked about my stop motion animation. The thing that was mostly said was the green screen effect I used near the start of the video. I like that feedback makes me feel better about my product I created and that my effects worked perfectly.

This was very helpful feedback to receive as although everyone who answered the questionnaire enjoyed my ESting, they still had improvement for it, which I appreciate. One of the improvements what to add more movements to the characters in the ESting, which I agree with but due to my time constraints and if I had more time then I would of defiantly added much more movement
of the character in the stop motion animation.

This is good because all of the answers are getting around the right rang of the actual target audience, which great to know,as it shows me that my stop motion animation video, did actually present itself at being targeted at my target audience, which is great.

This like the previous question as it does allow me to know that video does show off what it was meant to be and it is very much shown by the responses the question on the questionnaire, which also is a relief. 

I was quite surprised at this as although I didn't put that much time into the actually production part, I didn't think it would be seen as being a smooth video, so these responses make me feel much better. 

This is also a relief to see as they all seem to positive about my stop motion animation video, which is a very good thing, but there is one that says that didn't understand it, which is actually understandable which I discuss later with one the biggest constraints for my production for the stop motion animation.

There were a few constraints that I came across when producing this ESting which I had to work around. When I started to create the scene for the party scene at the end of the ESting, I decided I was going to use a card-box and fill the insides of the box with black to make it seem like a dark club scene. When I went to create the scene, none of the boxes had the amount of depth I needed to create the club scene so instead I used a smaller box and as a result it did not give the camera much room to move around the character to get better angles. The way I solved it is by when filming the shots I made sure that the lens was zoomed in so that I would a little more space fore camera movement in the shots and make it look much better. For this project, we were given just over a week to film and

produce this. I took a day longer than the set time as my project settings in premiere pro had messed up and caused the render to take hours, so instead it set me back a while trying to sort it out. I later realized that I had the project settings on 4K and when I had put it back down to 1080p, the whole project would either scale up or the render would be scaled up a lot. Up until this issue, I had managed my time very well and would have had it completed in time, but I managed to solve this issue in the end by being able to use my previous knowledge of premiere pro and was able to fix the problem quickly and got the work done as fast as possible. But it was also down to how I used my time in the production, as I spent more time in the post-production stage than I should of due to not being able to think of an idea for the stop motion animation and this was same for the production side as I had to multiply different scenes, that were rushed in order to try and fit it in the time limit we had for the production. I feel as if I did meet the brief for the E4 ESting as my finished product contained a soundtrack that was specified by E4, so it didn't contain any copyrighted music at all, making it eligible for the competition and my final product for the stop motion animation was in the duration of 10 seconds, which was what is specifically meant to be. My ESting also contained the E4 logo a few times. The website I used in order to create my questionnaire was called "Survey Monkey", this website allowed ,me to easily create and distribute my questionnaire. throughout the questionnaire the overall response to the stop stop motion animation was mostly positive with like I said before,something not getting the narrative and that is due to the time I had in order to do the production of the video, which didn't allow me to create a better narrative and also like I said before I sent the questionnaire out to friends and peers that fall under my target audience of male 16-30 year olds and also attempting to send it to my second target audience of the female gender instead.

From this project I feel I have learnt that you are not able to be as productive and creative under set deadlines as we only had a short amount of time to think of our ideas, which personally didn't give me enough time to find the inspiration for this production and instead feel like the concept for this was forced rather than inspired. I definitely think if I had a lot more time to think of ideas, I would have come up with a much better idea for my ESting. This was also hard to stick to the specified time period as I had a lot of shots to put in, I had to cut some ideas out in order to fit it all in, in under 10 seconds. Personally I feel that at this point in time I would not be very efficient or suited to the media industry as I have realised it can only be small set backs or malfunctions and you are suddenly behind on a deadline. This is a very recent realisation however, so if I was given proper time to adjust to working to a deadline promptly and specifications, I believe I would be a lot more confident in being efficient for this. As useful as animation can be and as much as I have learnt from studying its production, I don't feel this would be a suitable career for me and still have a keen interest in visual effects as shown throughout my ESting production. 

From the feedback I have received from the questionnaires I feel my animation is needing to have a few more elements of animation. Although everyone likes the concept, they also dont understand the narrative so I may need to also have made that clearer. The majority of people however, said they didn't understand the narrative but did enjoy the concept of going through the different locations and felt I did the locations with some green screen well. The responses for the target audience were also very accurate to the original audience that I had planned to target so I feel that went well. This feedback was also very useful as almost all of the responses had come from people within my target audiences which means their responses to this questionnaire are a lot more valuable as they are who my animation is aimed at. I feel that for my ESting, the locations and animation went well, however, the narrative could have perhaps been made clearer and more animation was needed throughout to keep it interesting.