Feedback and Finished Project

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Our animation Magic Stars is an advert for the chocolate ‘Magic Stars’. I think our animation is a good advert for the chocolate/product, I believe we used bright colours and the product it’s self in the advert, which shows we are advertising that chocolate. The fact we used a young child aged 10 was a good idea as I feel it helps us reach our target audience better as other children above and below his age group will kind of be able to either relate back to the advert with friends or think about that happening to themselves so therefore using a child who likes chocolate will help gain more viewers and consumers to the product. Our story is a suitable story as well because it’s about a boy dreaming about stars and the night sky, he then wakes up to find chocolate stars/ magic stars on his bed. Then the viewer realises the boy is actually still dreaming, and when he wakes up the chocolate is gone at the end of his bed. The visual style is good too as having the stars yellow against a black background makes them stand out and more eye catching for the viewer to be interested in watching the advert. Furthermore using the dream like bubbles and white glowing effect on the chocolate stars makes it feel as if you are there watching over the young boys dream as it happens, which I feel is different from other chocolate bar adverts. This is because not every advert gives you an insight into someone’s dream.

I feel overall the techniques we applied were really great. I say this because I think that it is the first time someone has ever worked with glow in the dark stars in a stop motion animation. Applying the 24 frames per second to each scene was a good idea as it makes the animation come out a lot smoother; I also think applying pixilation to the advert was a good idea too. I believe pixilation was a good idea to go with as the viewer can connect more with a real person, rather than having an animated character where I think they would only see a dream/story developing for that character. But by having a real young boy and using pixilation this will make the viewer feel more connected to the character as they themselves might have had glow in the dark stars. I believe I have worked extremely well with my production team as we made sure that each scene was as smooth as possible, furthermore we went to great lengths to make sure that the glow in the dark stars were almost looking the same in each shot, as we all know the glow in the dark stars do start to fade after you have put them under the light. I feel that we did our best in animating the objects, by making sure we did the 24 per frames per second, moving the stars little by little really did contribute to how well the animation finished up.

Of course you are never going to get the perfect product; I feel that one of our weaknesses in this animation was the quality of the glow in the dark stars; I say this because in shots you can see that they are fading and that they vary in colour depending on how much light they have received. So therefore that would be one of my improvements to make sure that each star looks consistent throughout in each shot for the animation. A strength we had was that the camerawork was really good throughout the animation; it was smooth and clear for each shot. Another strength I think we had was the fact at how each object was carefully animated to make sure that it looked smooth on screen and that we all took care into how the each shot looked to make sure it looked just right.

The pre planning of our production went well, I believe this because we looked into many different types of stop motion animation, but we as a group felt as if we should do something that was different from everything else. It was then when we stumbled across a video of a dance group dancing in glow in the dark clothes. When they performed a move on stage it actually looked like stop motion animation, form this point on we decided that we should go from a glow in the dark stop motion animation. We thought about many other objects that were glow in the dark that we could animate. But the one object that stood in our minds was the glow in the stars. This is where we also linked the idea of the glow in the dark stars with the chocolate magic stars. We thought it would catch the viewer’s eye as also most everyone we spoke to for research said that they had glow in the dark stars at one stage in their childhood. This links well with when we interviewed young children to see whether they had glow in the dark stars when they were children and to see what type of chocolate they would be interested in. Linked below is a video of us interviewing one of the target audience to see:
What their favourite chocolate sweet would be?
To see whether they had any glow in the dark objects?
What their favourite chocolate bar is on tv?
What they would expect to see on a chocolate advert?

The main idea was to gather an image to see what they are currently into and whether to see that the target audience would be into something that is new and different. we gather from this interview that the target audience would be into something that is unique and completely different from the adverts currently out on the market. Furthermore we built on this by adding glow in the dark to the animation and also by adding normal animation along with it too. When we added the normal the normal animation the aim was to help promote the product its self a bit more, as the advert starts off with the glow in the dark to grab the audiences eyes and attention. Then its changes back to normal standard animation to show and promote the product, so when the target audience sees or thinks about glow in the dark, they will think of the advert about the magic stars chocolate which involved the glow in the dark stars.  

With our feedback I think it went rather well and course there will be a few people who have dis agreements with how our come out. But personally our overall feedback was really good, the viewer’s said they enjoyed watching the advert and that they thought it does fit in with our target audience as we used a young actor and the fact that as a whole the advert had a childish feel and effects to it they all thought it suited the target audience. Adding to this we got some feedback on what we could improve on, one improvement was that we should spend a bit more time on editing the final slate so that it looks more like an advert finale slate. Another improvement suggestion we got was that maybe we should spend a little more time on filming the glow in the dark stars as in some shots you can see that the stars are a little faded so there for we would need to make sure that every shot looked like the other.

 

I believe that our animation is a good animation compared to the other stop motion animation adverts out there.  One example of an advert would be the Doritos tribe advert where the Doritos are dancing round the salsa pot, our advert is good compared to this advert I say this because they could the product as well, like we included the chocolate stars in our advert.  It compares well to the tic tac advert where they use the product tic tac’s to make fireworks out of the sweets themselves which I think is good as we can relate the glow in the dark stars in our advert to the chocolate stars late on it the advert. Finally I feel our animation has a good story line and that compares to the story line of the nokia n8 advert where a fisherman is catching fish then a big fish eats his boat. Whereas in our animation the boy has a dream within another dream to which he has one dream about glow in the dark stars and in another he dreams about the chocolate stars on his bed and them doing movements.

I truly believe that our animation can be compared to other animators, for example nick park, his stop motion animation 'Shaun the sheep' is a very childish yet catchy character. People mostly remember this character as the theme tune with his programme suit its so well. I think with a bit more editing like our target audience said so we can change and fiddle around with the theme tune to make it catchy enough for people to remember it whenever they look at a packet of magic stars. Obviously our style of animation s different from nick park as he doesn't animate objects, he uses claymation, but I feel that our animation can be compared with his as his sound tracks suit well with his animations.

Overall I believe that our animation came out well, and that the finished product relates well to the product and the adverts story in general. If we were to improve this or go further with this advert I believe we should spend more time on the editing to make this advert look as professional as possible. Adding to this I feel we should extend the finale slate to make the advert feel and look good in general.

We showed our advert to a group of people and filmed them answering questions. Me and Harry thought of questions that will get the best information for us to know what to improve on. These were the questions we asked them.

Do you think that the advert relates to the product?

Do you think the advert suits the target audience?

Do you like the soundtrack?

Do you feel that the soundtrack goes with the advert?

Could you see this advert on tv?

Would you buy a packet of magic stars after watching this advert?

Here I sent our animation of to Mars as they own the product milky way magic stars. On their website I found there is a whole section for media so therefore I emailed that department.














It is good to get feedback from the people who do this as a job, because we then get and idea on how we can improve our work and how we can take our work on further and develop it to become a better project. I'm yet to receive an email back from Mars but hopefully they will look at it. This may also inspire them to make such an advert this because glow in the dark animation is rare.