Syfy Brief - The Final Pitch Boards

I took a lot of feedback to heart and made some necessary changes to these pitch boards. There were complaints that they weren't clear enough and that there were no mock-ups. Overall, people were generally quite positive towards this but felt they needed improving. So these are my final pitch boards, and I think they work great. I didn't submit them, however, because I was so focused on other things that these were kind of neglected. I also didn't have the money to submit them either. It was just one stressful thing after another. On the bright side, though, I am quite proud of how they turned out in the end. Plus I did learn a lot from this experience. I'm just glad it's over though.

Loop de Loop: 'Gravity'

The theme for Loop de Loop at February and March was 'Gravity', which I wasn't really all that sure about. Seemed like a rather vague theme for animation, honestly. But for the sake of the my little animator bug that's been slowly dying in my mind for the past few months, I had to at least go for it. I admit, I was kind of lacking in ideas for this. After a while, I decided to experiment, by opening Flash and just keep going as I went along, then see where it takes me. So I just drew a generic stick-figure and started animating. Pretty straight-forward. I was kind of surprised with the results actually. It ran quite smoothly, though that's not to say it wasn't difficult and time-consuming like animation usually is, and I had fun with the expressions of the character. It fit the theme and looped quite well too. It's not perfect though, and I guess that's why it wasn't accepted for submission.

So this was decent practice for character animation, and straight ahead animation, something I've never tried before. Maybe in the future I can try it and it'll make it in.

11 Second Club: March

So *sigh* this friggin' website sure led to a series of blunders for me. I was going to do November's but I started way into the month and couldn't finish it in time, then I tried again on January, but then I lost all my save data (and again, this was way into the month so I couldn't start again), then finally I got to do the one for March! This time I completed it though, and boy am I happy!

As I am highly interested in character animation, and wish to practice that (and not to mention we haven't actually animated in a while) this was a great opportunity to really develop my skills in that field a lot more. I didn't actually target an audience for this one, though it might stifle my creativity if I did. That's not really the idea behind 11 second club anyway. The art style was a lot more expressive here, and I wanted each pose to be really unique. I also wanted the poses and animations to be really exaggerated to make it more interesting and humourous. Enough talk though, here's the video!

It actually did really well! Surprisingly well, for a first time. It just about scraped the top 50, taking the 53/228. JEEZ. If I keep this up I could eventually make it to at least the top 10.

Qwertee Design: 'Artorias Time'

Another Dark Souls mashup, this time with Adventure Time. I really like Dark Souls okay? This was another idea I had in order to appeal to a larger fanbase. It's based on one of the many hidden details within Dark Soul's lore, in which a Knight named Artorias had a Wolf friend named Sif, until Artorias got consumed by the abyss (I'll stop there because now I sound crazy). I figured a mashup like this would grab people that know the lore of Dark Souls and would get what this is referencing. And of course they might even get the humour of it, taking what is a pretty depressing story and mashing it up with the one of most uplifting duos on TV. I actually got told by someone that they would wear this design if it was a shirt, so clearly I've improved quite a bit, ever since I started making Qwertee designs.

This is what I made:

I think I've learned more than I originally planned from doing Qwertee designs. They're certainly harder and more time-consuming to master than I initially thought! I might make more in the future. I'm pretty satisfied with what I've got, now back to animating (something I haven't done in far too long)!

Qwertee Design: 'Gravity Souls'

For this design, I figured I would try creating a mash-up of two franchises that I enjoy a lot, Dark Souls and Gravity Falls. This may be limiting the target audience to a very select group of people, folks that enjoy both Dark Souls and Gravity Falls together, and that might be a relatively small audience. I didn't mind, though. I just really enjoyed the idea. The cool thing about Qwertee is that they give you a lot of creative freedom with the designs; even if they might not get a lot of votes, they are still worth doing regardless of that. Anyway, I thought I'd create this to see if I could capture the art style of someone else, seeing how it translates with my style, and establishing scenarios in a single image, which I think is a really important method of practicing visual storytelling.

Here it is:

I actually really enjoyed making this! It was a good way to practice different poses, and I think I captured the character's emotions and personalities through body-language perfectly. The scenario presented is clear and, I think, portrays how it would go if it happened in Gravity Falls. I think the Black Knight is well stylised (though I wish I could have made him taller). I think where I fall flat is the background art, though. In case you can't tell, the setting is supposed to be a specific room in Dark Souls in a location called "Undead Burg", but it's not very clear, since I didn't do a great job at colouring it. I might go back to this and resubmit it in the future, since I think that is where the potential could lie. I just have to get good at drawing backgrounds... Oh and you can tell right away that I definitely spent more time on this than I did that crappy Psycho Mantis design.

Qwertee Design: 'Psycho Mantis Reads Your Memories'

For this design, I wanted to develop my new shading technique a lot more, and really wanted to base it on Metal Gear Solid, having only just played it for the first time ever, at the time. Although this time, I tried to work extra fast. Unlike the "Ren is Angry" design, this took a lot less planning and I basically spent an afternoon or less on it. The idea was to parody a rather notorious scene in the game in which the villain, Psycho Mantis, reads the memory card in the Playstation and talks about which games the player enjoys, only instead he's saying "you like Metal Gear Solid, don't you?".

Here's how it turned out:

It wasn't... terrible (I love how I drew the hands, actually), but it wasn't great either. As I said, I thought I could rush this design, assuming a t-shirt was basically something you could easily accomplish in less than a day, but as it turns out it still requires a decent amount of effort. It brought to mind my past errors of rushing a lot of my character designs and pre-development work, rather than actually spending time on them. Oh well, next time, I'll actually work much harder on them, like with my Ren is Angry design (I actually spent more time on that than I did with this).

Qwertee Design: Ren & Stimpy

I've been looking into doing some designs for Qwertee, to practice my character design, illustration skills, and m ability to reach an audience. Since I'm not a popular artist by any means, I wanted to see how well my designs could reach audiences, because I've always felt there was kind of a popularity contest in this environment; and Qwertee basically picks and chooses which new designs get featured, and they're always the designs that are likely to win. Otherwise, the only way to get enough votes to be printed on a shirt is if you were popular enough for people to vote for it if you asked them too. I figured I would still put a lot of effort into each one because while I am rather cynical towards the system of Qwertee being that the most noticed design wins, I still want to learn new skills, and I might actually get lucky for a change too.

My first design is based on a rather popular scene from The Ren & Stimpy Show, where Ren Hoek gets so mad at Stimpy that he very calmly, but angrily, describes in detail how he's going to kill him. It was a really funny scene that most fans of the show talk about when the series is brought up. I chose to design a shirt based on Ren & Stimpy because it seemed that there were no designs for that show, which was strange because it has enough of a following for people to buy shirts and there is quite a bit of potential for possible shirt designs. I guess it's one of those shows you have to be reminded of before realising you enjoy it. I figured this shirt would stand out, since it's the only design based on Ren & Stimpy, and I might make a few more based on this cartoon in the future.

I first wondered which part of the scene I chose I could develop into the design. It had to be a key part, with a quote that people would recognise. I decided, in the end, that it should be the moment Ren says "I'm so angry", because first of all, that line along with the keyframe summed up the whole scene perfectly; secondly, it has a very specific key frame for Ren as he's saying the line that stands out incredibly well and could work as the image used for the design.

This is how it turned out in the end, and for my first time designing a t-shirt, and being not the most confident about my illustration skills, I think it holds up extremely well. As you can probably tell, I took the frame I mentioned and traced over it, but added a lot more detail to it, since just drawing the same frame without adding anything would be kind of boring. I developed a rather neat shading technique from this, by using heavy black shadow giving it a very edgy look. I tried to make the imagery edgy and comedic to make this memorable and cool looking. I think this has convinced me to continue submitting Qwertee designs, among other designs for sites like this.

My Syfy Brief

I wrote down what I plan on creating for the Syfy brief in this sheet in my own words, so that you could get a better understanding on what I plan to create.

This isn't exactly a finalised brief; depends if it's straight-forward enough or that I have the right idea about what I want to do. I might lower the frame rate a tad. While I am planning on using short little tweens for the animation, that would move very smoothly, it might change over time to frame-by-frame animation, simply because it has it's own appeal, and I might enjoy it a lot more.

Responding to my Target Audience: Imagery

I was wondering what sort of imagery is actually appealing to my target audience. By that I mean, what colours, symbolism, and art style will grab their attention? I thought a lot about this, since this is a key aspect for my brief, and, as an animator, I should always be thinking about everything visually. So what sort of imagery actually appeals to my target audience?

One thing's for sure, I should always remember one huge key thing. Simplicity. As much as you might want to deny it, it is a fact that simple looking images are far more appealing to the brain than huge and complex images. This usually refers to images comprised of solid colours, simple shapes, and a distinct lack of realism. As an example of this, here are screenshots of two animes with entirely different styles, one very simple and the other more detailed:

Most likely, your eyes were drawn to the latter image, despite being slightly smaller and lower down than the first image. It automatically stands out more because of its vibrant solid colours, and dynamic lines. The first image is more dull and realistic, which your eye is instantly drawn away from.

Ironically, though, images can actually be too simple, and it instead becomes unappealing. Creating simple images is one thing, but an important key factor is that it needs to come to life, still be well-drawn, and contain at least SOME semblance of realism. I'm going take one of the 12 principles of animation as an example, as it applies to art in general. The principle known as "Solid Drawing" describes images that give people a sense of solidity, as the name suggests, depending on how it is drawn. This is done by drawing an image as if it was a three-dimensional object, rather than a simple 2D image on a canvas.

This image, taken from The Simpsons Handbook by Matt Groening, explains why a 2D image looks really bad without the solid drawing principle in mind. If the character appears to exist in a 3D plain, it just automatically looks better. 

I made this image to describe in my own words this concept. Perhaps I've gone into detail a bit too much, but this is important for people working mainly in 2D, like me.

Now with all that said, how does this apply to my target audience exactly? Well, quite a bit actually. The target audience is fairly young, for starters, which means their minds are still at the development stage, so simple 2D images would look especially appealing to them. Since they are sci-fi fans as well, I should also apply this entire concept with the genre signifiers that I mentioned in a previous post.

Responding to my Target Audience: Genre Signifiers

Colour actually plays an important role in this as well. An audience searching for a specific genre will likely find a specific colour that comes along with it. They are just one of many genre signifiers. All genres for visual mediums are given key signifiers that represent what type of medium audiences are consuming. In fact, that's literally the definition of a genre. It is one of many aspects of human nature we take for granted, the need to simplify/label everything so that it instantly makes sense to us. Though, what is a genre signifier? Everybody should know already, but haven't quite thought about it yet. A genre signifier is one aspect of any given genre that defines it.

A genre signifier for any visual medium would be a specific type of mise-en-scene that would normally be associated with that medium. A horror movie, for example, would normally contain very dark and bleak colours (usually red, because of the association with blood and danger, and black, because of its association with the dark), threatening monsters, and very serious, edgy, subtle body language (from human characters). A comedy, on the other hand, depending on what type of comedy it would be, would use more vibrant colours, exaggerated body language, and typically a real-world setting. A comedy and horror hybrid would combine these two types of images, exaggerating the red and black colours (whilst also making them more vibrant), using threatening monsters but depicting them in a comedic manner, and using human characters with exaggerated scares and body language.

In order to appeal to sci-fi fans, I will look at whatever visual genre signifiers I can find.

Colours: Usually, a sci-fi will emphasise heavily on blue colours, since the blue will remind audiences of space and high tech. Green is typically used for sci-fi films about aliens, because those two are things that people will associate with each other, despite aliens rather rarely being depicted as green. White is usually used for sci-fi films set in a futuristic utopia, brown and grey for apocalyptic future settings, and black and dark blue for dystopian future settings.

Mise en Scene: High tech machines and objects are normally used for sci-fi films. The clothing of a character would either be a funky looking uniform for a space crew, or some bizarre outfit as a futuristic fashion choice. If the film is about monsters, they wouldn't be supernatural creatures/myths like vampires, werewolves, etc., they would normally be some kind of mutated version of existing creatures, usually insects, sea creatures, and reptiles (and at one point, clowns). The marketing of the films, if they were targeted towards men, would normally depict a nameless scantily clad woman in danger (normally in the 50s but occasionally nowadays as well).

Non-verbal Communication: Mainly in a marketing standpoint, a sci-fi poster would usually show a character brandishing a laser gun, or any kind of high tech weapon, within the poster of an action/sci-fi. A sci-fi monster movie would either show the monster in a threatening pose or fighting another monster, both of which next to a skyscraper in a city to emphasise scale. There would also be a group of the main characters looking in terror at the monsters. The poster of a film set in the future would usually show a character looking up, presumably at the world around them, with a stunned expression on their face, to establish the spectacle of this world. In a dystopian future, the narrative is more bleak so there wouldn't be as much focus an the characters' entire bodies, just their serious facial expressions, and possibly a weapon they have held in front of their faces.

Responding to my Target Audience: Overview

The brief I have chosen for Responsive describes their target audience simply as "18-25 year old sci-fi fans". They obviously make it sound like a simple audience because if they went onto full detail about their target audience, it would be too overwhelming for people if they looked at "Target Audience" and saw a huge essay about several groups of people. I can see where they are coming from, though, even with that vague description. Very quickly, though, I'm going to take a look at two key target audience types:

Primary Audience: This describes the audience a product would focus on, mainly; that would mean adapting a product or content that fits the needs of a very specific group of people.

Secondary Audience: An audience a product would appeal to without even trying to. This could be due to said audience being related in some way to the primary audience of a type of product or content; for example, parents watching a kid's show with their children would be said kid's show's secondary audience, while the kids are the primary audience.

This relates heavily to how I plan on appealing to my target audience, so I'm going to try and translate what Syfy calls "18-25 year old sci-fi fans" into something more literal. I'm going to apply more audience theory into this, but I won't explain things like "Segmenting Psychographics" or even just the aspects like "The 4 Cs" and "Social Classes" or else we're gonna be here forever, so I'm going to describe what I think Syfy's target audience comprise of, with reference to "Segmenting Psychographics".

When I think of 18-25 year old sci-fi fans, within the context of this brief, I immediately think of huge nerds, like me; to be specific, I think of people who are fans of TV, cinema, and anime; typically follow the action, comedy, horror, and fantasy (as well as sci-fi, obviously), and are particularly into cheesy cult films. I don't have a specific race or gender in mind, and let's keep it that way! I have nothing against appealing to this audience. I actually think they have the right idea, too.

Of course, that's only the tip of the ice berg, I want to go way deeper now. Potential secondary audiences could be audiences between the ages 7-13 years old, watching these shows with an older sibling or even their parents. I, personally, watched shows like Buffy and Angel rather religiously when I was at least nine years old, so there's no denying this. Not only that, but children generally have an interest in shows or movies considered too mature for them. The more mainstream audiences, fans of more popular stuff from Syfy's competing networks (Channel 4, E4, ITV 1 & 2, etc.) could find something appealing about the Syfy channel, too. Thanks to shows like The Big Bang Theory, Parks & Recreation, and other shows/movies with "typical nerd" character types, "geek culture" is more mainstream nowadays, so it might appeal to fans of more popular TV and Film. A more mature audience of 35 years and up might even find this channel appealing as well, since these are the type of people who may get a sense of relaxation from watching cheesy cult shows/movies, since people that age normally go through everyday stress from work and seek comfort from the TV they watch, so they wouldn't really want something that would make them "think" too much.

Brief Selection - Part 2: Syfy Brief - What is the Problem?

Syfy set up a YCN brief recently, due to their apparent loss of viewers, and it very much fit in with what I wanted to achieve from this module. I'm happy to do this because it seems very relevant to me, personally. This is a good opportunity to understand audiences better, especially within the realm of entertainment and storytelling. What do I specifically need to know first?

For starters, what are the problems the brief describes?

Syfy has been losing viewing figures lately, and there are multiple reasons for this. Audiences are not appreciating the content of Syfy enough to see the channel as anything relevant on the same level as other TV channels, and don't see it as a place to go for sci fi. They are often overlooked because they must compete with higher budget TV channels, some that aren't sci fi oriented, that air sci fi of higher quality to conventional audiences. Syfy doesn't have the budget to broadcast Hollywood blockbusters, and they are overlooked because of this.

So I know the problem, but what are they asking me to do about it? What do they want to achieve?

They seem intent on letting a target audience of sci fi fans of the age range 18 to 25 know that the level of passion they have for sci fi is extremely high and that my work should convince them of that. They are asking me to make something, it could be anything since this is an open brief, that will communicate the idea that the Syfy brand is a creative and imaginative one, and that the Syfy channel should be sold more for what it represents ("Imagine Greater") than just the content they air.

Who will benefit from this, though?
This will be beneficial for Syfy, of course. They want sci fi fans to see Syfy as a creative environment, where people go to fulfil their need for something imaginative. Audiences will also benefit from this, if what they gain from this is as great as Syfy wants it to be.

What message are they trying to convey?
Quite simply, they want to send the message that they are a more than a channel, but a creative realm of ideas. They are fun and entertaining, imaginative, can enrich people's lives, passionate about the sci fi genre. That Syfy is a place for sci fi fans, by sci fi fans. To be the ultimate fan!

Who exactly are the audience for this brief
I highlight "exactly" because while the brief only says "18-25 sci fi fans", I believe it goes much deeper than that, but I'll go more into detail with this in a later post. To put it simply, the target audience is not race and gender biased. They are people that enjoy sci fi, good story-telling, engaging stories, and fun ideas.

So we know the message and the audience, we just need to know how the message will be delivered.
Going by these bullet points in the brief:

• Be the ultimate fan
• Be impactful
• Be engaging
• Be playful
• Be surprising

They're kind of vague, but I can see where they're coming from. They want whatever I make to establish that they are huge fans of sci fi, and they want to do it in a manner that relates to the genre, while being light-hearted about it. They also want my work to have an impact and to do that, I need to engage with their audience's love for surprise and the unexpected.

Can I foresee any issues with this brief?
I don't think so. I guess the fact that this is an open brief is kind of overwhelming, because I'm not sure what I could make that relates to my area of practice. I guess an ident would be the most appropriate.

Brief Selection - Part 1:

I will be taking part in some selected briefs to practice some areas of interest involving my skills as an animator. I looked at and considered several areas I need to focus on in the future. I thought a lot about it and I feel that the areas to focus on are, character design, 2D animation, and appealing to a target audience. The reason for this is that for character design, I have a bad habit of designing a character and going with the first design I come up with. I tend to get lucky from doing this, of course, but I want to spend more time on character design so that I can get used to it and develop each character I design more and more until they are perfect. I want to practice 2D animation, because that is the medium I am undoubtedly the most interested in, and I want to maintain, or even improve, the skills I already have while I'm learning 3D in my other module. I want to develop my understanding on target audiences because I want to know how to appeal to an audience, in terms of how to advertise myself and possibly even others, and creating appropriate content for specific audiences; because while I enjoy storytelling, I never really take target audience into consideration enough and I want to take my current knowledge even deeper, because I know I'm capable of being successful at this, having gotten high grades in the past in media studies, when looking at audience theory.