Focus Group

Animation Feedback

After completing our Final Major Project, we had to get together a focus group made of people in our class in our target audience. The point in a focus group is to give you feedback on your work and show their attitudes and beliefs towards it.

All of the feedback was good and most of it we improved our animation upon.

The group that they used said that they liked the animation because it had a quirky feel to it. They liked the creativity of it and it wasn't something that they had seen a lot.

When showing our group the animation, we had our production name at the end, just before the credits. They suggested that we move this to right at the beginning of the animation because it flows better with the style, seeing as before the production name was after the quote. After moving it to the beginning, we agreed with them that it looked a lot better and flowed well.

Another point that was put across was the suitable length of the film. They said that the film was just the right length, any shorter and the story would have been rushed, but any longer and they would have got bored and waiting for it to end. 

While Jack and Blair were editing the music over the top, they purposely left a gap between the songs and this was something that our focus group picked up on too. They suggested that the music flows and starts straight after the other, as with a gap it seemed unfinished unintentional. We highly agreed with this, and so put the music together, which went well.

Finally, when we showed them the finished animation, we hadn't yet had a chance to put sound effects and foley on it. We wanted to get the feedback from the focus group on whether or not they felt we should put foley on it, because of the simplicity of the animation and mainly the music all the way through. After watching it, they thought that we should put sound effects on only the main sounds in the animation, as to not over crowd the sound with the music, and so this is what we did. 

Task 7- marketing profile

Marketing Profile

A marketing profile is something which companies create to firstly, plan how their marketing strategies will work and how their target audience will perceive them. Things that are usually included are characteristics of their product/service and how they can get their target audience to pick up on their ways of introducing and practically ‘selling’ it to them.

The first thing that we used for marketing our animation was our pitch. Pitches are a way to promote or sell your idea and views. We created a pitch that we had to show to our tutor, putting across a detailed, yet in an interesting and creative way our idea, it’s target audience, where we got our inspiration from etc. This was done before we had gone into detail with creating our backgrounds and characters, but we had enough information to know in which direction we would be going.

The main piece of marketing that films use is their websites, trailers and posters. Film posters are put on buses, billboards, in magazines, newspapers, in cinemas, on adverts online and in a lot of other places. Film posters are created to catch your eye, to make you remember the film and to make you want to go to the cinema and watch it. The pictures used should reflect the film and also the mood of the film, and grab your attention and make it memorable. Film trailers are a very big marketing resource, as they can be seen on the television, in the cinema before the film starts and online. They are used to show clips of a film that will enable the audience to understand the storyline of a film, but not too much to make them not feel the need to go and see it. A film trailer is something that we didn’t do for our animation, and I don’t particularly think that it’s long enough to make a trailer or if we would want there to be a trailer as a poster would be enough. Something myself and Kelly have created though is a website, which has details about the animation and about us creating it.

Above, is our film poster, which will be a marketing aid. This will be hung up on the screening evening of all of the second years final major projects. Posters could also be put up around college to promote the night, and our film poster to promote which films will be seen.

Our website is a key to marketing our film, with links to our blogs which can also be a tool to market it. , which has a page about the animation with a brief synopsis, a crew page with text explaining what we had to do as a group , pictures of us and links to our blogs. The other page has inspirations, showing films that prompted us to come up with our final idea and a locations page, showing the different countries that Bill travels to. On our website is links to a facebook and twitter page. Although we haven’t created a either of these accounts, it would be a very good way to aim at our target audience. Paranormal Activity was made on a very small budget, as our animation was, and most of the marketing was done for free via twitter and facebook.

Lastly, a way of marketing that was highly successful for The Blair Witch Project is word of mouth. Word of mouth means when people talk about your film to their friends, family and acquaintances and spread the work, almost unknowingly. If the marketing is done in the right way, this can be highly successful to get a positive word of mouth about your film.  

Film Poster

For our website and for the screening of our animation, we had to create a film poster. This is the film poster that I created on Photoshop.

I tried to make the poster as relative to the animation as I could, making it landscape instead of portrait to reflect the way that we shot the animation in the scrapbook with landscape A4 backgrounds. I chose the green background to match the website and also with green being the colour that countries are shown as on the world map. I also wanted the background to look like those we had painted for the backgrounds in the animation, as I thought this would put across the style of it.

 I added a world map to the background because this is the main point of the animation and the message we are putting across, which can be seen to the right of the character. This is a quote that we based our animation on and appears at the end of it too.

The font, I kept the same as what we used in the animation too. We chose this font because it looks like hand writing and goes well with the concept of a scrap book. Lastly, the silhouette of our character Bill which is easily recognisable. He is standing in this position because it looks like a stance of excitement, and one that is seen in Carpe Diem when he is in Hoollywood.

Lastle, our production name "Not Even Afraid Productions" is at the bottom of the poster, again in the same font as it is in our animation.

SMART Targets- Task 6

SMART Targets

Now we have planned our project, the next assignment in this brief is to create SMART/SMARTER goals for ourselves. These goals will help to keep us on track and motivated.

The acronym stands for:

S- Specific: creating a clear and understanding goal, including why, where, when and how.

M-Measurable: Making sure your goal is measurable so you can tell when you have achieved it.

A-Agreed upon: Agreement within the group of the goals set

R- Realistic: A goal that is challenging but achievable by including things you can do and control.

T- Time-Bound: Giving goals a deadline to be motivational of achieving it.

E- Ethical: Setting goals that meet a high ethical standard and not out of your comfort zone.

R- Resourced: Commit time, money, information sources or support to enable you to commit enough to make the goal achievement possible.

The SMART goals that we as a group have set ourselves are:

Specific: The storyline of our animation is to be a 'feel good' and is based on the quote "The world is a book and those who do not travel only read a page." Our 'specific' goal is to make sure that this message comes across to the audience clearly. The reason for wanting the idea to be clear to our audience is because of the moral story we have behind it, and will be ongoing throughout the duration of the animation. We will do this by including scenes with Bill receiving postcards from Amy with 'Seize the day' written on them when he's off travelling. The message will become clear at the end of the animation when the quote earlier mentioned appears on screen.

Measurable:  Our shooting schedule is a tool that we completed to make sure that our animation will be completed on time. The shooting schedule tells us what days we will be filming which scene, what times we start and the locations of them. By keeping up to date with our shooting schedule, we will be able to measure when we are close to finishing our animation.

Agreed Upon: Making sure that our group agreed upon the aims and goals that we were set within the group is important so that we are all working towards reaching the same goals, thus being motivated and ready to meet the next.

Realistic: A realistic goal for us to complete would be for us to complete our animation on time with our shooting schedule. This is a realistic goal because it is manageable for us to speed up the process. With four of us in the group and two main roles, anything that we are behind on, the other two in the group who don't have anything to do can be getting on with something else. For example, although myself and Kelly spend days getting the backgrounds and object painted, if we don't have enough time to finish them, this is something we can be working on when Blair and Jack our filming.

Time- Bound: Again, going by our shooting schedule is a time-bound goal. We will have to be in time with the shooting schedule to make sure that we meet our deadline. If we don't meet our deadline, this means that our work will be late in, and will probably make the group lose motivation of finishing.

Ethical: Gaining the highest grade we can with our work ethics, decision making and time management is another goal we have set. By working towards the brief and keeping everything in time with the deadlines and responding positively to feedback given from tutors is setting ourselves a goal that is within our comfort zone, but may need a little more work.

Resourced: As our production is an animation, it will be  very lengthy process and something that we will have to be patient in creating and shooting. Myself and Kelly have given up a lot of our time by painting all of the backgrounds and objects needed in our story. By committing this time, we have worked towards meeting our goal of completing our animation on time.

Website Feedback

Myself and Kelly had to create our production website. Although this was originally Blairs job, she had other work that she was busy completing to catch-up on.
We created the website using the free website hoster and creator 'Wix'. The URL for the website is www.samanthalong4.wix.com/carpediem.

After we quickly put together the website, we got a focus group together of students in our class. From the focus group, we wanted feedback on how we could improve our website. The feedback that we received will be explained below.

The first bit of feedback that cropped up a lot was our background colour. We thought that our background colour was best white at first, because of all the heavily coloured images we had included. However, after the meeting with the focus group, they found that the background colour of the website would be better suited in a light blue or light pink. We agreed with this feedback and so decided to change the background colour to a light blue, which we felt brought the website together with the wide range of colours.

Another thing that our target audience picked up on was the amount of information we had given on each page. The layout of our website meant that we couldn't include an awful lot of information on each page, and neither did we think it was necessary. But, after receiving this feedback and looking at other film marketing websites, we thought that more information should be given to enable the target audience to gain an understanding of what our production was about and to entice them to want to watch it.

Our last bit of feedback that we decided to act upon was on our 'Locations' page. We noticed particularly that the audience was interested in the different locations that the characters travel to. As our animation is focused around the quote "The World is a book and those who do not travel only read a page", we thought that it was important to add a bit more information on what we wanted the audience to think about each location and why the characters decided to travel.

One bit of feedback that we thought wasn't applicable to our animation was a characters page. Because we only have two characters who are silhouettes and outlines with no speech, we felt that having a characters page would not only be uninteresting, but irrelevant. Even though we had to do character development in our pre-production, we wanted the characters life and travelling to be focused on more, rather than the character and his characteristics.

Below are pictures of the website after I had made all of the changes.

The home page with part of the film poster and more or a colour scheme.

About page with more information on what the animation is about and a picture of the beginning of the film. 

The crew page, explaining some of our roles and pictures which have links to each of our blogs.

Our inspirations page, showing films and an independent animation where we got some of our ideas from and the style of the animation.

The locations page now has more information and a slide show of pictures of the different locations, giving the audience more of an idea what we mean by 'locations'.

Presentation- Task 4

The M&M's Product, Marketing and Price

Quality of the Product

An Australian Advert from 1987 shows the company boasting about the quality of their products.

The Advert is very similar to ones from Lindt, known for it’s high quality in Swiss chocolate- showing M&M’s

were not the only ones wanting to boast about their quality.

Their slogan is “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.”, something else showing their quality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51BqE1FdJ0Y

Presentation

How products are presented to the public can be a big influence as to whether or not someone will want to buy.

They come in over one hundred different colours, the main ones being green, red, yellow, brown and blue.

They have a small white ‘m’ stamped onto each individual sweet.

Their packaging is also brightly coloured, appealing well to their target audience. 

Price

The chart shows the inflation on pack of M&M’s since 1955.

The chart shows that in January 2010 in the US, the price of a packet of M&M’s went up dramatically- around 40 cents.

This may be because of the new range of coconut M&M’s, the re-branding of their packaging in the US and another new range in New Zealand and Australia of 

‘Bare All’.

Are they worth their price?

Price and Value

Cost- The amount you spend to produce a product or service.

Price- What financial reward you gain from your product or service- what you expect your customer to pay.

Value- What your customer believes the product or service is worth.

The cost to produce an M&M is thought to be around half an American cent.

The price of M&M’s is around 60p for a small bag and just over £1 for a share bag.

The value of M&M’s is debateable from customer to customer, but I personally think their prices are reasonable. 

Advertising

One of their most recent and biggest advertising campaigns was their advert at the Super Bowl in February- advertising their new range ‘Bare All’.

This also revealed their sixth character.

Their characters are another advertising technique, by appealing to their target audience of young children.

M&M’s using their characters as an advertising campaign is something that makes them easily recognisable.

Their red and yellow characters are used the most, mainly in cinema adverts.

Their M&M’s shops in London and the US sell merchandise with all the characters, as well as lots of different colour sweets.

The Four Utilities of Marketing

Form Utility- Processing raw materials into the finished product, enabling meeting customer needs and wants.

Place Utility- Transporting goods to outlets for customers to purchase.

Possession Utility- Gaining evidence of legal ownership of a product.

Time Utility- Making products readily available for customers to buy. 

Form- Cocoa beans, sugar and milk being made into M&M’s.

Place- Transporting goods worldwide via aeroplanes, lorries and boats.

Possession- Owning a receipt from shops, cinemas etc proving your ownership of M&M’s.

Time- Shops having stockrooms where they keep their overstock of M&M packets.

SWOT Analysis

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Strenghts

•Worldwide good reputation

•Part of the Mars Company

•Strong marketing and advertising using coloured sweets as characters

•Affordable

•Easily Accessible

•Lots of colours available, suitable for anyone, any occasion or any age

•Personalisation of sweets available, ideal for gifts or occasions

Weaknesses

•Although they are one of the strongest and most known chocolate companies due to their advertising, it costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time in comparison to other Mars products.

Opportunities

•Because they are known worldwide, any new product will be welcomed

•Their M&M World shops aren’t only shops but tourist attractions, widening their consumer market

•They own over 30 licenses to create merchandise e.g. t-shirts, figurines and mugs

•Advancement in technology allows them to develop more products and character profiles

Threats

•Lots of competition from other worldwide and well known chocolate making companies

•Their biggest competition ‘Hershey's’ are always creating new chocolate bars

•Increase and inflation of chocolate could grow, meaning their prices go up and their sales may go down

Website Planning

As our website is part of marketing our film, I thought it was important that the style of the website reflects our animation style and so I have tried my best to do this. The link to our website is:

http://samanthalon4.wix.com/carpediem

The homepage will consist of the film poster, along with the name of the production ‘Carpe Diem’. This page, like every other will have the links to the other pages and also the name of the production. In the left bottom hand corner, we will have symbols for twitter and facebook- these will not be working links as we will not have a twitter and facebook page, but this will fit in with our target audience. The colour scheme throughout the website will be green, black white and grey. There will also be myself and Kelly’s names at the bottom to show we created the website.

About

This page will be about our animation, with a brief synopsis. The background will be a key picture from the animation, possibly one from the beginning. We don’t want to have too much writing but enough to be able to tell what the story is about, instead enough for them to want to watch it and find out. This again will fit in with our target audience as they will not want to read an awful lot about the animation.

Crew

The next page will be about the crew and an explanation of what we had to do and how we all worked together. Pictures of us whilst shooting the animation will be included and this will also go towards evidence of what we have done. Links to each of our blogs will be on the page too, which shows the work we have produced and evidence too.

Inspirations

Our ‘inspirations’ page will explain and show pictures of all the places which helped us to develop our idea. From the independent animation that we got some of our inspiration from the style of, to Disney films such as UP and Tangled that we liked certain scenes of and the concept of the story- seeing as much of the world as they can. The other thing we liked about the Disney films is that they have a positive moral to their films and this is definitely something we feel would be a part of the message of our animation.

Locations

By locations, we mean all the different countries that Bill visits in the animation, explaining why we obviously (and unfortunately) couldn’t travel to the different destinations that Bill travels to. This page will also include pictures of the backgrounds from the animation that myself and Kelly created, which will give the page a bit more detail and will explain it more.

After I have created the website, the group will have to put together a focus group to get feedback from it and ways we can improve it. A write up of the feedback will be available to see on our blogs.