Animation Evaluation

In order to exhibit my product, it was initially uploaded to YouTube. I have embedded it here. Then, I shared the YouTube link to some of my friends and family via social media. The reason I did this is to first of all, ensure my work is viewed. 

Also, I wanted to gain some feedback, to find out if my animation achieved the purpose I had set it to achieve. However, I feel like sharing it to my friends and family was perhaps a biased approach, because a lot of them will share the same interests as me so this could have shown in the results.

This, surprisingly, wasn't the case. Upon obtaining feedback, I discovered that my idea was completely different to those I asked. I purposely used questions that would fit in with the idea of the animation. Here are my questions:

• Which gender are you?
• How old are you?
• After watching this animation, which age range do you think it would attract?
• After watching this animation, which gender do you think it would attract?
• Which styles did you notice being used within this animation?
• Rate the aesthetic quality
• Rate the imaginative quality
• Which genre do you think this animation fits into? 
• Which do you like the most after watching my animation?

The first couple of questions set the tone for the answers I was about to receive. I found out that the average age of my participants was 19 years old; which is great, because that's the kind of age range I was aiming for. However, I then found out that the the survey participants were largely male orientated, with 90% being male. This is by no means a dilemma, as my target audience was males, but it would have been nice to get a well-rounded opinion.

Question 1 results

The results I obtained for question 3 were interesting, but also expected. Although I had hoped to attract an older target audience pre-production, I did find myself making it more 'childish' than I first imagined, which turned out to be fine. This shown in my results, as 50% of people believed it would tailor to children between the ages of 7 and 13 years old.

Question 3 results

Question 4 was the one I was anticipating the most. I originally aimed to achieve a male target audience, and I assumed that, after finishing my animation, I had achieved this. However, my peers disagreed. 80% of the people who voted, voted for both genders. The remaining two participants were split between male and female.

Question 4 results

I aimed to achieve a rather messy look to my animation, which is why I was shocked to see the results of one of my questions. I asked my participants to rate the aesthetic quality out of 100, and the average equaled 64%, which isn't bad considering I made it look rather unpolished. I was more impressed when I asked them to rate the imaginative quality, and received an average of 73%

Question 6 results

Question 7 results

The Process

When making my ESting, due to me being at home and using all props that I had handcrafted or made amendments to, there was no problem with legal issues. The only prop that I needed to buy was plasticine, which isn't the most expensive thing in the world, especially considering I only needed two colours.

My time management was certainly an area I could improve on. Although I managed to meet the deadline, I was unable to follow my personal production, which would have made the animation less stressful to complete. Having a lot of short time slots dedicated to making this ESting was how I planned it to pan out, however missing one slot led to me missing the next which resulted in me having more to do in less time. I started well, getting my first two seconds of content done within my first few days, however I ended up with the remaining eight seconds to do within three days. This is achievable, as shown, however it's not ideal.

Luckily, I had already prepared which music I would be using, which obviously complied to E4's regulations. The audio clip was ten seconds long, as was my animation. Although I would have preferred more time, these were the rules set by E4 and honestly, I feel like they made my animation better and more entertaining. If the rules weren't in place, I would have overthought the whole project, but following them made everything much more efficient. 

In order to obtain feedback, I created an online questionnaire. This was done after my animation was made, and I learnt a lot from it. I distributed the survey, along with my finished ESting across social media, as well as asking my family to complete it.

I feel like I definitely learnt how to be independent in this project. Beforehand, I had relied on others too much to carry the work to completion. It was me taking a task on by myself in order to realise that I was relying on others. I'm happy that I was thrown into the deep end, so to speak, as I feel like this is the best way I learn. I now appreciate single person productions much more than I used to, because I've had firsthand experience of the complications that can be encountered in such a production. 

I feel like I completed this task to the best of my ability, in the given time, so I'm happy on that front. This is the first time I've been asked to follow a brief and a time limit when making a moving image project, so I feel like it's a strong learning curve, perhaps the strongest I'll ever get. It's given me a lot of confidence, and I would definitely be open to doing it again. It would be interesting to see how I can incorporate what I've learnt into other media forms, for example documentaries. There's definitely more assurance when working in a team, but I'm no longer as scared as I was once to work independently.

However, sticking with animations - they're certainly fun to make. I love the idea of taking an object that many would look at as inanimate, and giving it human-like features. I used plasticine and a few household toys in order to produce mine, but I would love to broaden this. Many students in my class used people at the forefront of their productions, and they looked good. This is something I would consider for the next animation I possibly make. If I were to be hindsight bias, I would say that this was the best choice of props to achieve what I wanted to achieve. Working with humans in an animation would certainly be more flexible, and there'd be a wider variety to what you could portray, so I can see why this is what's used in the majority of animations. 

Overall, I'm happy with how this project turned out. Obviously, there's a few things that I look back at now and see the improvements that could be made, but that's only natural. Judging by the feedback I got, others are of the same opinion as me.