Research and analysis

So I have studying and looking at the E4 channel to do some research. I have also been looking at the esting website which shows all the previous competition entries and this years entries so far.

The website is:
http://www.e4.com/estings/index.html

So the first thing I did was look at previous entries and I did this by looking year by year.

The first competition was in 2008. The shortlisted ones and the winners tended to be technically good even if the story was not amazing. At first the competition was to advertise and identify E4 music which was a section during the day on the E4 channel. All the shortlists and winners showed the logo almost the whole time or revealed it shortly after the start so people knew exactly what they were watching. Some of the most failed ones were because they had just stuck the logo on at the end and not integrated it at all. Many were technically poor.

The second year in 2009 saw more story and more humour over technique. Some of the entires were very technically good but they didn't even get shortlisted because there was no rhythm or story. Again, many did not integrate the E4 logo and could have been used to advertise anything because the logo was just stuck on at the end.

Integrating the logo has now been added to the brief (probably because so little actually integrated the logo).

Looking at the channel itself, it aims at young adults and mainly features comedy programs or dramas that are also aimed at young adults. They know their audience well because it is very popular amongst this age group and every show is very appealing.

It has a purple theme and all of their own idents shown recently use animation methods to a very good standard. The most recent being the claymation E4 idents that usually show an area or room with lots of things going on at once. This could be why they have launched this competition to see any new talent.

The competition is only open to people over 16 so it encourages their target audience to create an ident for them. Most idents that have been created are usually very weird and unusual which is what the channel usually favour. They are usually quite comedic as well.

Although they only last ten seconds, the best ones have always given you a sense of story. For example, one of the shortlisted ones was a butterfly catcher that then falls over. Another was a boy on a child toy that turned out to be quite fast and violent but he liked it so put more money in to ride again.

These factors are going to be very important. What I have learnt it that it must have some sort of story and be quite comedic. It also does not have to be technically brilliant but could let the story down if it is not. It must integrate the logo from early on and it must have appeal. It does not necessarily have to have the purple colour scheme but it could help identify the channel better.

We have chosen to do the animation in 2D as it contains people so will be much easier if they do not need to be rigged.