Ident Project

BTEC National

Park Hall Academy

Water Orton Road

Solihull

B36 9HF

Client: Park Hall Academy Media Studies Department.
Person: Miss D Raison.
Date: 4th May 2011.
Location: Park Hall Academy, Solihull.

Dear Miss Raison,

This is a proposal for a promotional motion stop graphic ident for use in Park Hall Academy’s Media Productions. This ident should represent the work done by students within the department as well as the Academy itself. The medium which will be used to produce the ident itself will be the form of stop motion animation.

The target audience for the ident include students & media students, parents, prospective parents and teachers. In terms of age the first Target audience will be from the ages of eleven to eighteen. Secondary target audience includes the ages of thirty to fifty-five. With the client being an educational establishment, the target audience is not limited to these target audiences and is very open as this is a comprehensive Academy. I think that the thing to mostly consider is target audience over age range.

The use of animation is a key aspect in his as it is relative to children through the use of story lines, colours and being animated itself. The target audience for many animated programmes is rather low and does not really catch our target audiences, but, done right, we can focus on animation as a medium and not as a target audience capture. Some example of animation that our primary target audience include television cartoons such as The Simpsons or South Park.

The groups plan for the storyline involves using classic stop motion characters such as Pingu and Morph and remaking this with a media aspect, through the use of green screen technology, stop motion, special effects, clean graphics and super imposing dynamic scenes as well as green screen in the dynamic scene. The stop motion characters will already have been famous and the idea behind them created by somebody else but our group will produce our own remake of these with our own unique take on them, this may be an extra such as

In terms of budget we do not feel that we need a large budget as we already have many resources available to us, below is a list of what the group may possibly need:

Time is an issue for us, below we have created a brief plan of how we plan top use our time. In terms of logistics we feel that we have full use of the media department including green screens and tripods without the need to move items very far. We also have to take in to consideration that we are relying on shared resources and when equipment will become available. We hope to reserve our equipment for Wednesday and Thursday mornings as this is the time we will be in the room where the equipment is based and this is first thing in the morning so we will be able to reach equipment first.

We have big plans for the motion ident, we need to aim to be between ten and fifteen seconds long for the ident,most importantly is there must always be action on the screen as this is an ident intended to capture an audience’s attention thus getting maximum view time and attention for all is of vital importance. We can not have just a few seconds of action in the production as it is important that a viewer does not miss a certain part of the motion. We think if we brainstorm creatively and collectively in our group we can make this vision become a reality and work together to complete this production.

Potential problems which could arise in the production include, not taking enough shots as it can take a very long time to get just a few shots in stop motion animation. Another is there is something in a shot we don’t realise, or another is of course the camera shaking. We could overcome many of these including editing images that have something in the shot which we never realized, deleting, retaking or un-applying shake in image editing tools but these could give a bad effect on the shot, and for not taking enough shots, we just have to make a rough estimation of how many shots we need or we could pad the time out with title credits.

The technologies that will be required for successful production of this ident include but are not limited to:

In the group we will all allocate individual creative roles, whilst making sure that we all get the same amount of experience in terms of switching roles or contributing to other roles making for a shared experience, such as the group sharing directing roles, editing roles, camera operator roles. To make this a reality, we will all edit a separate version of the production as well as individually brainstorming and putting this in to a collective group brain storm.

In terms of time allocation, we estimate with our current lesson slots that the entire process will take around four weeks to complete, including editing time and production time itself. Below is a rough estimation of how we will allocate time in this 20 hour period (5 hours per week):

2 Hours planning

1 Hour resource gathering

4 Hour resource creation

2 Hour set creation

4 Hour of actually producing the raw images of the stop motion

6 Hours editing

1 Hour review and Final edits

After this process the group will then make a group decision on which we think is the best ident for us to show, we will vote on this through a range of aspects including, target audience appeal, keeping to the original plan, individual creative flair, level of editing, appeal of ident, time constraints, action on screen, professionalism and individual feelings on each others idents.

After production of the ident the group will survey across the target audiences showing the motion ident asking for a general response and review from the target audience. We plan to do this through the use of a focus group so that we can show the ident in one single viewing whilst maximising the time we have. After the focus group have viewed the ident a satisfactory amount of times, we will then ask them to fill out a questionnaire so we can find what we can improve on our ident if anything, as well as how the target audiences respond to the motion ident. We intend to keep the survey findings anonymous as this eliminates needs to scare audiences with data protection, so the easiest way around that is to not take any personal information, this would all take a massive implication on the time we have to spend on the project if we are researching time in to legal law for things we can simply work around.

After we have focused on our research group, the production group will all meet and will discuss the finding of the focus group, how we will act upon this and how we will move forward as a group on this. We will also meet with the client in this process to discuss the focus group results with the client.

After we have made the last revision we will then review the final product ourselves and with the

client to act upon the findings of the research group and the clients statements, if we have made adequate progress on what was raised in the focus group study then we will be at the stage where we can release the final finished ident to the client.

I feel that with the use of idents you could  establish a brand image and with the help of our group, we will be able to make this a success. Idents are used a lot, especially in the television industry and can make an identity for a network, presenting a professional image of your department and will make you stand above the other media academies across the country. By displaying the ident with every production that you air you can integrate all the creative work that is produced within the department.

The group thank you for taking the time to consider us for the creation of your project and we look forward to hearing from you soon in regards of whether you would like to go ahead with the ident creation project.

Yours Faithfully,

Gary Spencer