Spreading the word! (external companies)

Now that i've made my stop motion and people seem to like it, I think it's time to spread the word!

This included sending emails to various companies and television channels in order to get a professional opinion:

This is what happened!

I decided to send this to the Horror Channel due to my ident being horror themed, my email had been successfully sent, but as of yet I have not heard any response from the Horror Channel, for now I am just awaiting feedback and a general opinion from them.

Feedback

Now, when it comes to getting an opinion on what people thing of your product, feedback is key! 

Below I will show you some examples of feedback I got from numerous people via social networking sites or threw personal contact.

Firstly through Facebook:     

I was pleasantly surprised at the positive feedback I received through Facebook upon asking people what they thought about my ident. Some of the responses can be found below:

I initially asked the people above a general question of what the thought about my ident, they then said wether they liked it or hated it. To get a more in depth analysis I asked why, the responses are what you see above.

Not all the feedback I got was positive, yet I took the negative feedback into consideration and will rectify the problems next time I attempt a video such at this.

As well as the negative feedback, I also took the positive feedback into consideration, the techniques that people liked I will use again if ever attempting this genre of film. 

One of the main problems came with the lighting featured in my ident, some people mentioned that it should be darker at parts, so to rectify this I would lower the brightness and potentially the saturation.

Other people also stated that it needs to be slightly more realistic. To rectify this problem I would lower the amount of vignette used in order to stop the image blurring so much in the corners.

Research

When it comes to producing a new product, television series or pretty much anything for that matter research is key!


The research I have conducted can be split into various different sub headings.



These can be seen in a table below:

When it comes to content you must first have an idea of what you are going to produce, from the start I knew I was going to be producing a horror themed ident so the majority of research that was done went into looking at this particular genre.

So how exactly does content fit in with research and what is content?

Well content is simply the presentation of information for a purpose to an audience through a channel in a form.

In terms of media and dealing with idents the content will be everything that the viewer sees onscreen, this ranges from the colours used in the ident, to the location the ident is set in and the font used in the horror channel logo.


In order to make it easier to layout I have split the content up into a few sub headings:


Font

Now you are probably thinking, 'font' is that really the most important aspect of your ident? In response to that I would state that everything that you include in your ident must be there for a reason, so why not make the best out of it. The wide variety of typefaces now a days gives you a vast option for which text to choose depending on what you are using it for!

For example the font used for my ident I found on Dafont.com.

Here is a link to the site:  http://www.dafont.com/

Now from that you can immediately see that on the home page there are different categories of font styles, these include Fancy, Techno and Gothic. As you would expect for someone who is producing a horror ident, I delved right into to the horror section of the fonts. Yet from this I could not seem to find the perfect font that would be used for my ident so I decided to look elsewhere and opt for 'destroy'. From there after looking threw countless amounts of pages I found the perfect front to use. 

The font I opted for is called 'Payday' and can be seen being used for the logo of my ident here:

After choosing my font I had another problem on my hands, what colours would be used in the logo, looking at previous research I had done (focus group and questionnaire/survey) I was able to recognise that the colours most associated with horror are both red and black. After also looking at some website's to do with horror including the one I have listed below the colours used in those websites would back the information I had collected in my research.

Here we can see the website for the horror channel: http://www.horrorchannel.co.uk/

You can see the main colours used in this website are black and red.


Location

 When it came to location I had conducted a lot of research into this particular factor.

Due to my ident being horror themed I looked at many ghost and horror stories and where they were set.

I looked at certain stories such as 'Slenderman' and came to a realisation, that the majority of ghost stories at some point feature a wooded area, one much like I have at the bottom of my garden. This was only a thought on location but I felt I had to do more personal research before I could confirm that this is where the filming would take place.

More about the 'Slenderman' can be found here: http://theslenderman.wikia.com/wiki/Slender_Man

Therefore I  looked back at a questionnaire/survey I had conducted earlier, I had found one of the questions that I asked was about location. 

The question I asked was:  What settings do you associated most with horror films?

Upon many answers in which I got one of them was a graveyard and a garden. When looking at location in which I would be filming I assessed wether my garden looked as if it could be a typical horror themed location. After deciding that my garden did look 'creepy' enough to film my ident in my next challenge would come in terms of editing and how I would have to alter the shots to add a darker atmosphere.


Here are some pictures of the garden:

Along with filming in the garden another location in which I used was a hallway in my house. Now I know this particular shot is original yet it had been pulled off well in many horror films so I thought to include it in my ident.


Successful use of the hallway shot can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMbI7DmLCNI


Here is the hallway I used in the making of my ident:

The stop motion style used for my ident was Pixelation!

What is pixelation you ask?

Well pixelation is a style in which actors are used as a frame by frame subject on an animated film. This means to an extent that the actor becomes a living stop motion puppet. The way in which you create this involves taking a picture and then getting the actor to more a certain part of his body. This process then gets repeated and when all the frames are put together in sequence it will look like the actor is moving.

So why choose pixelation?

Well I chose pixelation because I have looked at other horror idents (some of which I will be posting below) and found that they all include real life people and situations as oppose to something such as claymation. In addition to this whilst conducting my survey at no point did people seem to remember any animated horror films, just one's involving live footage and actors! 

From looking at Jan Svankmajer, I got a good example on how pixelation can turn an ordinary situation, crazy (yet still being able to involve live actors). To research how this could be done I looked at one of his stop motion's which was called 'Food', a link to the video can be found below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxpqUas_Vqc


When it comes to the actual visual style of the ident I would explain that as being modern horror incorporated with a bit of fantasy and slight surrealism.

The modern part being the way that the movie was shot as if it was part of the 'Footage Found' genre which is relatively new and can be seen in movies such as Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project. This being a modern genre is due to the technology (cameras) progressing in terms of size, accessibility and how easy they are to operate.

The fantasy aspect of my ident can be seen when the figure or character can be seen, this is certainly not a normal everyday occurrence seeing a figure with long black hair jolt it's way down your front corridor. For this reason a sense of fantasy is added to the ident. 

Surrealism is used in the storyline of my ident, in addition to this it is also used when the white constant flashes appear on screen and when the tally marks appear.

When it comes to audience for horror channels the age range for people watching is not that large, from reading certain online poles and collecting my own data about people of all different ages and what genre of TV and film they most regularly watch I can strongly confirm that when it comes to a horror audience that we are dealing with people who are ages 18 to 50 and mostly male.

That means the content I will be producing will be mainly watched by males, but never did I say that the audience was all male, in addition to the male audience I will also be expecting a handful of females to be watching. That means my ident will have to be targeted towards both genders, now the horror channel is not very gender specific and whoever tunes into to the channel just by name will know what content and genre the channel will be showing.

For the reason stated above I can assume any females watching my channel will be horror fans at heart and familiar to scenes that involve blood, gore and general creepiness. So because of this I will not limit certain content out of my ident.

Since I have decided that my horror ident will be dark and partly surreal, who better to have as my influence than Tim Burton.

I looked at some of the films he produced such as 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' to gain an idea of atmosphere and what aspects of surrealism I could include in my ident.

I also studied his website in order to find ideas:  http://www.timburton.com/


In terms of stop motion my main influence was Jan Svankmajer and I looked at certain pixelation shorts he had done before to get a brief idea of how to produce them, along with Tim Burton, Svankmajer also does a lot of surrealism, and for that reason these two men where my main influences when it came to the surrealism aspect of my ident.

A big influence mainly for the visuals and how the ident would be shot was Paranormal Activity. Having watched it myself I know the kind of atmosphere it was able to build up and what tension it created, these two things are not only needed in a horror ident but are key, so for that reason I decided to use some of the techniques which I thought worked well in the filming of that movie series and implemented them into my ident. In addition to this much like myself Paranormal Activity I had to create something scary and horror themed on a low budget. Paranormal Activity managed to do this well (with the overall budget of the film being $15 000 and it making $193 335 800 in the box office) for this reason I would say that Paranormal Activity is the influence which I mostly followed when producing, filming and editing my ident. 



 






As stated earlier I would explain my style for my ident as being modern horror incorporated with a bit of fantasy and slight surrealism. But how do I create this style?

Well to create this style I had to look at past movies which were related to the style I was hoping to convey, this involved looking at films such as Paranormal Activity, looking at the lighting of it and camera techniques used in the certain genre.

I noticed from researching some of these scenes that a technique that is commonly used is 'bad TV'. This is more commonly known as static or camera noise, this feature appeared many times in my ident.
Along with that I noticed the scenes in which horror or scares usually occur, the camera is usually tinted a certain colour slightly, in Paranormal Activity this is usually a dark green or blue-ish colour.

In order to create this a certain tint in my ident, yet adding a little twist I added a vignette to the footage, along with this I also de-saturised the pictures so that a certain amount of saturation could be seen, but the scene would not fully take place in colour!

To add a final touch to the ident and add the surrealist aspect talked about earlier, in random points throughout the ident white flashes would be seen (usually when the character is close) and along with this on 3 separate occasions tally marks appear on screen, if you look closely you can see the tally marks add up to 24, this is due to the name of the channel being 'Horror 24'

The white flashes were created on Final Cut Pro and the tally lines were created on Motion!

In terms of channel reasearch my main influence and focus was the horror channel, I have included a link to there website above. I looked mainly at the colours used, the intended audience, the footage that was posted on the channel and the idents that they used.

Some of the indents can be found here: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtPqm5eLcdQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gi9MYfeLeQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO9GJctyRN4

These idents were my biggest influences in terms of story lines and ideas, the ideas used in the videos would become a base for the storyline which was used in my actual ident. 






Along with ideas used previously I had to create my own ideas when it came to producing my ident. Something that I thought I would do would be to combine past, well executed horror techniques, put a majority of them together and then add my own personal twist on them and that's exactly what I did.

I took Samara Morgan from the 2002 horror hit 'The Ring' and made a character based off her, yet with my own twist, a slight difference in terms of character and look, something that had not been seen before. 

In addition to this I created my very own soundtrack for my ident by taking songs, mixing them and combining them with additional sound effects such as the slamming of a heavy door. To create an overall original soundtrack that will enhance the atmosphere of my ident. 

Finally I have combined my footage with effects such as a vignette to give them more individuality and at certain points in the video I added camera noise and white flashes, yet again these changes were made in order to make the footage that I shot more individual and visually more pleasing.

Present Stop Motion Animations

Present Stop Motion Animations

Some people think that Stop Motion Animation is an out dated technique, but the reality is that this could not be further from the truth. In this topic we will be focusing on present examples of where Stop Motion is used, whether in music videos, films, television or in games.

Stop Motion in television:

You will be amazed at how often stop motion is used in television and yet you just haven't realised.

A majority of television shows that Stop Motion is used in are children's shows, examples of these are given below:

Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends:

Thomas and friends is a children's television series  that ran on the ITV network and debuted on the 4th of september 1984. When originally produced in Shepperton Studios stop motion animation using models was used, at the time this seemed like the most effective method of animating the stories. During this time animals and humans were static figures whilst vehicles  and locomotives were operated by radio. Stop motion would then be implemented if a animal or human character would have to move, occasionally hand drawn animation would have to be used, this can be seen in series 3 where in a scene involving bees, the bees had to be hand drawn.  



Bob the Builder:

Bob the Builder is yet another British children's television series which utilises stop motion
animation. The show is created by Keith Chapman, and in the original broadcasts which  origin from the United Kingdom, Bob is voiced by English actor Neil Morrissey. This particular show uses the technique of claymation, this means the majority of on screen action tacking place will involve objects being made out of clay, these objects will then be moved slightly and a picture will then be taken, once a sufficient number of pictures are built up it will seem as if the character is moving.



Postman Pat

Postman Pat is a children's television series based in the United Kingdom and is aimed at pre-school children. The series was produced by Woodland Animations, and it debuted it's first 13 episode series on the BBC1 in 1981. The show stars Pat Clifton a postman in the fictional village of Greendale, throughout the series we follow Pat's adventures along with his fateful black and white cat named Jess. This show is also stop motion and would of been set up and filmed in the same way as Thomas and Friends, using different materials to form different models and people.



Pingu

Pingu is a BAFTA award winning stop motion children's television show, created by Otmar Gutmann. The story involves a young penguin named Pingu who lives in an igloo in Antarctica, in the show we follow the adventures and mischief he gets up to with his friend Robby the seal and his little sister Pinga. This show official debuted on the 28th of may 1986 and became an instant hit due to the simplicity and effectiveness of the programme. The stop motion technique used in this show is Claymation which is the same technique used for Bob the Builder and it would of been set up and filmed in the exact same way.

Stop motion in music:

When thinking of Stop Motion people often suspect that this type of animation and technique is only used in film and television, when in actual fact, Stop Motion covers a much broader media, making it's way into music videos. Below I have listed some notable music videos from the past few years which utilise stop motion to good effect:                                                                     

We Have Band – “You Came Out” (2009) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtGJ1lD23-U

To create this one of a kind music video 4,816 still images were used, and shot over a period of two days, the animated mouth action in the video can be related to other stop motion television shows, a prime example of one of these shows would be South Park. 

This Flickr page has got all the shots that were taken in the production of this video:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/39167181@N06

Of Montreal – “An Eluardian Instance” (2009)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpYQioEnfDQ

A good thing about stop motion is that it enables you to take a seemingly normal sequence of photos and add in a bit of wonderment with animations. In this case, a perfectly normal picnic turns into either a very good, bad or weird experience. If you’re following the vibe of the song,your experience is likely to be good. Yet if you happen to have an unsubsiding fear of kites, the experience can be very, very, very bad.

Oren Lavie – “Her Morning Elegance” (2010)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_HXUhShhmY

When an idea like this comes to live, it has no choice but to become a viral video, I mean we've all imagined this haven't we? You’re lying in bed half asleep and you picture your bodily poses against the 2D screen that is your bed as you pretend to be walking or floating around the screen with a variety of backdrops, wether it's walking up a mountain, swimming in an ocean or running a race, no only me! Well obviously i'm not the only one, Lavie who directed this video shares some of my madness, but in order to turn fantasy into reality it took  a month of computer-assisted storyboarding, which was then followed by two days of shooting 3,225 stills!

Delta Heavy- Get by (2012)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cOt9UcYGOU

My personal favourite of all stop motion music videos, why? The videos ability to put a modern twist on classic techniques, but in such a sleek, stylish and cool way, makes this video hart to fault. The intricacy and time that has gone in to making this video has earnt this video a place in my personal top 10 greatest music videos of all time!

Stop motion Ident:

E4 have started to use Stop Motion in a variety of there TV ident's nowadays, this technique has been used to take what was once a very familiar surrounding and turning it into something completely different, with furniture flying everywhere and a purple ooze leaking out of a chest of draws. All I can say is, I feel sorry for the poor person who has to clean all this up!

Some of E4's stop motion ident's can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeJp-KHFP0Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOw4i-UB8Lw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBYn8uzTa4A

  

 Stop motion Films:

Along with television stop motion also gets frequently used in film, an exapmle of this is   Chicken Run the 2000's stop motion hit produced by Aardman animations, and another is  Wallace and Gromit curse of the Ware Rabbit.

Along with feature length films, short films have also been shot in stop motion, an example of these are               

                                    
A close shave:       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy9QeosTh7w&list=ELTcM5pyogLoY&index=3

A grand day out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw78po4J-HQ

The Wrong Trousers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKZdsPvJq60




Stop motion games:

This is where shop motion get's a whole lot more interactive!  Stop motion now enters the world of gaming and it's managed to stand it's ground.

Voyager the game

Voyager the game which is a game available for iPod touch, iPad and iPhone, in this game you zoom through space! Avoid planes, satellites, asteroids, planets and unexpected creatures lurking in the darkest depths of this galaxy and beyond. The objective of the game is to get as high as you can without crashing into any of the obstacles mentioned above.

The creator of this game was Ken Amarit and Me Studios who opted to create this game out of needle-pointed wool and stop-motion animation technique. 

Cletus clay

Cletus clay is a game available on the XBOX 360 and is designed by Anthony Flack

So how is this game made? Well everything starts out as preliminary sketches that were drawn at the start of designing the game, the pictures will then be assessed and the models will be built individually according to the picture that goes with them. Once the models are built they are then photographed cut out, cleaned up and photoshopped. The image is then taken and extruded into 3D by mapping onto a mischief triangle and parts of the shape are pulled out in order to create a relief structure.

This is the website for the game, on here you can find videos of how this game was created, you can find gameplay examples and much more!

http://www.cletusclay.com/