Breaking the rules of animation
Actual logo
Celebrate Ayrshire – green and gold – connotations of health, nature, luxury.
Note how the elongated A which begins Ayrshire also links with “celebrate” and draws attention to “Ate” linking food, celebration and location. The dot above the I becomes a firework and is the only other colour apart from the deliberately chosen blank space (negative space) of white. Why white and not black? The colours might have looked bolder against black so why was white chosen? Is it more summery? Will it be changed to black later on in the year? Sans serif font. The “A” almost looks like a 4 – is it suggesting 2014? So many connotations in one little logo. Is the “C” a snake’s head, evocative of some monster? Can you be this clever? Of course you can!
Harry Potter sets
now turned into a theme park. How to extract every last penny of profit.
S3 – Nat 3/4 Comics – Homework for over the holidays
Use these links to look at some online versions of comics:
http://www.moosekidcomics.com/
http://www.beano.com/
http://www.dandy.com/
http://www.oorwullie.co.uk/
http://titanmagazines.com/t/simpsons-comics/?locale=uk
http://www.dccomics.com/comics
http://www.asterix.com/
We will be starting a comic unit when we come back after the holidays. You will need to understand the following by the end of the unit:
Target audience – who normally reads each of the comics, what pleasure they get from it, what need is being met?
Narrative structure – how is each comic normally laid out, what similarities are there between different brands of comic, what is each comic’s unique selling point?
Stereotypes – Which characters in the strips are stereotypes of how certain groups of people are supposed to behave? (For example which characters are stereotypes of heroes?)
Colour – is the comic strip in colour? Why/why not? What does the choice of colour/monochrome (black and white) tell you about the comic strip?
Institution – the people who make each comic earn money from it and it is their business. Work out how they make a profit from their comics.
It will help you if you actually buy a real comic to look at. These can be found in your local newsagents.
Know your colours from works of art
Know your colours from works of art
Famous artists use colour to convey their message. Look at the combinations under each painting.
Royalty Free
http://classroomclipart.com/
http://www.shutterstock.com/
http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/creativeimages/royaltyfree
How to make a film
BBC resource. Lots of good ideas from pre-production through to marketing and distribution.
More about target audiences for media products
Constructing Audience
When a media text is being planned, perhaps the most important question the producers consider is “Does it have an audience?” If the answer to this is ‘no’, then there is no point in going any further. If no one is going to watch/read/play/buy the text, the producers aren’t going to make any money or get their message across. Audience research is a major part of any media company’s work. They use questionnaires, focus groups, and comparisons to existing media texts, and spend a great deal of time and money finding out if there is anyone out there who might be interested in their idea.
It’s a serious business; media producers basically want to know the
- income bracket/status
- age
- gender
- race
- location
of their potential audience, a method of categorising known as demographics. Once they know this they can begin to shape their text to appeal to a group with known reading/viewing/listening habits.
One common way of describing audiences is to use a letter code to show their income bracket:
| A | Top management, bankers, lawyers, doctors and other highly salaried professionals |
| B | Middle management, teachers, many ‘creatives’ eg graphic designers etc |
| C1 | Office supervisors, junior managers, nurses, specialist clerical staff etc |
| C2 | Skilled workers, tradespersons (white collar) |
| D | Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers (blue collar) |
| E | Unemployed, students, pensioners, casual workers |
They also consider very carefully how that audience might react to, or engage with, their text. The following are all factors in analysing or predicting this reaction.
| AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT | This describes how an audience interacts with a media text. Different people react in different ways to the same text. |
| AUDIENCE EXPECTATIONS | These are the advance ideas an audience may have about a text. This particularly applies to genre pieces. Don’t forget that producers often play with or deliberately shatter audience expectations. |
| AUDIENCE FOREKNOWLEDGE | This is the definite information (rather than the vague expectations) which an audience brings to a media product. |
| AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATION | This is the way in which audiences feel themselves connected to a particular media text, in that they feel it directly expresses their attitude or lifestyle. |
| AUDIENCE PLACEMENT | This is the range of strategies media producers use to directly target a particular audience and make them feel that the media text is specially ‘for them’. |
| AUDIENCE RESEARCH | Measuring an audience is very important to all media institutions. Research is done at all stages of production of a media text, and, once produced, audience will be continually monitored. |
Audience reaction to even early versions of a media text is closely watched. Hollywood studios routinely show a pre-release version of every movie they make to a test audience, and will often make changes to the movie that are requested by that audience. (Via mediaknowall.com)
Click – The World of Gaming
Enter the Grid
Magazine industry – Target audiences?
Who are the target audiences for these products? How could you tell just from the front cover?
