Audience Research

UKTribes

UKTribes.com is a which catalogues information the various sub-cultural groups which exist in present day young society. This website will be useful to our group as it will give us an insight into the styling and brand affiliation of the characters. It will also allow us to target our project towards a specific audience.

The research conducted on UKTribes shows that there are fewer hard bounderaies between social groups as in the past, with complex relationships between each group. The website also states that the groups of those containing 'alternative' media tastes are now sufficiently large enough to not denote outsider status for the individuals. As such, the alternative crowd of young people can be considered as entering into the mainstream. The website describes individuals in the alternative group as conforming to their peers, and being different as a group, rather than by themselves.

Due to the groups interests, the project has taken an alternative stance by default, however using this information will allow us target more specifically towards our youth target audience.

The research conducted by CrowdDNA shows that brands favoured by the young alternative crowd include H&M and Vans. This information will allow us to give the characters accurate and believable styling and costume for the characters.

Previsualisation

In today's lesson, Chris brought up the idea of using an animated storyboard, also know as "previs". As our group did not follow our storyboard closely in our original project, I began researching into the possibilities of creating our own previsualisation during the preparation stage. However, it soon became obvious that the task of creating a previs the length of our short film would be far to large for a project as small as ours.

Here's an example of previsualisation being used for the movie trilogy "The Lord of The Rings". At around 8:52, an example of very basic animated sequences being combined with frames of storyboards. The still images are used to show facial expression and pose of characters, whilst the 3D animation is used to show movement and positioning around the scene.



Here is an example of more modern previs being used on the latest Indiana Jones movie, demonstrating movement of key objects and characters in each shot.



Whilst we may not use 3D animation in combination with a storyboard to plan out our project, however by placing the storyboard frames in a sequence should give us a much clearer starting point when filming.

Tools available

Previs anamatics are usually created using a combination of editing and 3D software. My initial plan was to use a program such as Adobe Photoshop to cut out characters and important objects from a scanned in storyboard and animate their basic movement on screen, and use a 3D animation package such as Blender for complex movement. However, to save time we could have instead used another piece of animation software, Source Filmmaker, and would not have to create our own resources such as characters, objects and scenes, instead using readily available game assets from games running on the Source engine.

Whilst not strictly previs, the animation software is demonstrated below, in which a scene from The Matrix has been recreated using this tool and pre made assets.

Further narrative development

Over the past couple of lessons our group has discussed which events should occur in the alternative imaginary sequences. Here are the events that

• 'Real' world fight sequence
• Enter imaginary state
• Alternative events
• Exit imagination
• Considering imagined scenarios
• Scenario occurs again, attempt to effect reality