Will89’s Weblog

Right here is my research for my animaiton project. We were ask to choose four different animations of our choosing which we felt appeal to four distinctly different audience groups, and to explain and justify our choices for choosing them.

So here are my four animations that I choose to research:

Tom & Jerry

Target Audience: 4 – Upwards

Tom and Jerry is a children’s cartoon series about a mouse and cat, living in the same house, however for filling a traditional stereotype of “cat and mouse”, audience gets to view an ongoing rivalry between the two, which consists of numerous of comically chases and confrontations. Usually the format of each episode consists of Tom trying to catch Jerry some way but endlessly failing, due to the cleverness of Jerry’s plans.

The target audience for Tom and Jerry is aimed towards a young audience, mostly children from the ages of 4 and upward. As there tends to be no dialogue within the cartoon, it provides an advantage for attracting a children audience, as they don’t have to listen to any dialogue to make sense of what is occurring in the cartoon.

The added advantage of this cartoon is that it has the power to grab the attention of an older audience, by playing on its humorous mayhem and comically accidents. This can make the older audience relate to personal experiences in reality of their own pets, getting up to no good.

Family Guy

Target Audience: 18 – 30 years old

Family Guy is an American animation that portrays the comically semi-dysfunctional Griffin family, which consists of Peter the farther “the so called breadwinner”, Lois the mother and house wife of the family, Meg the teenaged daughter who is portrayed as the unpopular member of the family due to Peter making jokes about her, Chris the stereotypically unintelligent teenaged son, Stewie the high intelligent baby who plans to conquer the world also having a personal vendetta to kill Lois all the time and Brain the talking dog who acts like a human being but still having the all qualities of an every day dog.

Family Guy is aimed towards the older teenaged and young adult audiences, with its array of comedy and intertextuality/parodies of different media texts within the episodes and also dealing with a number of stereotypes. Yet again this animation, like many others have the ability to make the audience relate to this animation and compare it to their everyday lives.

Simon’s Cat

Target Audience: 12 – Upwards

Simon’s Cat is a few short animated episodes, animated simply in black and white 2D, about a stereotypical household cat, which tries to achieve to pestered it’s owner called Simon into feed him, through various comical mishaps and annoyances like any other cat in today society.

This animation has the potential, just like Tom & Jerry to captivate a larger audience age range, through it’s very comically mishaps in the cat’s plans, than it’s originally target audience from 12 and upwards and also using the aspect of relating to today’s society.

Honda: The Dream Comes True

Target Audience: 20 – upwards

The animation, Honda: The Dream Comes True, is about a short story, portraying background life of Soichiro Honda through array of colourful montages and landscapes, repairing bicycles at his home, however, come night time Soichiro retreats in to his study and draws various designs and falls asleep in the process, where the audience get to experience Soichiro Honda’s dream about creating his design on a bigger scale within his fantasy world, and waking up to be enlighten that his dreams become reality in founding the Honda Company.

As this animation film is based around dreams and fantasy, it achieves by appealing to almost all audience age ranges, as is touches on the fact that everyone dreams and everyone can relate to the animation film. The reason why this animation can captivate a large audience, as it allows the audience to use their imagination, through it’s diegetic and non-diegetic sounds to empower their own dreams and also due to the fact that this short story can to perceived as being true from coming from nothing to becoming everything.

Conclusion

When conducting my research into various animations, I found that most animation found on the internet for example, were mostly to do with violence’s, shoot’em ups, blood and killing. From my own analysis there seems to be this niche market in audiences, in today’s society demanding violence’s and killing. This could be pointed at current events occurring around the world, that are influencing the audiences to response in this way.

However, shown from my research there are some beautiful, comical and inspiring pieces of animation work out there, which audience can enjoy, be entertained by and relate to, that appeals to more larger audiences, that haven’t fallen into this growing stereotypical audience, as mentioned above.

From this research, it has inspired me create an animation, aimed for a young audience, predominantly children, but also having the power to reach out to older audiences. I intend to create an interactive animation based around a day in a life of a dog. The audience will be able to interact with the dog in various situations and decisions. To keep the audience interested in my animation I intend to approach this animation with the idea of simplicity, with an added comical factor, inspired by Tom & Jerry and Simon’s Cat.

At last I have finally reached the third unit of my first year here at Bournemouth Uni, which is the Audience Unit, based mainly around flash animation for us interactive media production people.

The Breif for this unit states as follows: 

1. Research ‘animation in relation to audience’ and identify four different animation examples which you feel appeal to four distinctly different audience groups . Write 100 to 150 word on each example to explain and justify your choices, and obtain images or clips to illustrate your examples.

2. Based on your research findings, storyboard and create a short Flash animation of your own which would appeal to one of your selected audience groups.  Use ActionScript to explore interactivity, and the ways that giving control to the users can affect the narrative.  Also feature the use of sound/music). Explain your choice and solution, including how it relates to a particular user group.  

 

During the lectures and your research you will discover that there are also many different animation media and techniques (chalk, oil on glass, paper cut-out, cel-layers, plasticine,  puppetry etc).  However for the purposes of this project your chosen solution must be achievable using Flash software. Your solution may be either a complete short idea or a partially storyboarded larger idea, but in either case you must use movement and sound to showcase your solution. 

Aim for a user experience of between 1 and 2 minutes.

3. Use Flash to create a website which contains your research images and text, your storyboard, essay assignment and the completed Flash animation.

Bournemouth University Audience Unit Brief 2009

 

When I first got this brief a week and a half ago (apologies for my lack of posting on this blog due to medical reasons), I realised that I got a hell of amount of work to get through within 4 and a bit weeks and it also doesnt help that I will have to write an essay on top of this work load as well. The lectures have been nice an not told what the essay title is for this unit is yet and probably spring it on us next week, me thinks. not looking forward to that !!!

But on a positive note with this unit, I’ll get the chance to learn lot about animations and their workings and how the audience work within today’s media society.  

My next post, which will be posted later on today or tomorrow will be about my research into four different animations of my choice.