Research and Planning: E4 and the Brief

Research and Planning: E4 and the Brief

E4 is a British television channel owned and run by Channel Four Television Corporation. The "E" stands for entertainment. Funded by adverting, it is targeted toward 16-34 year old's and originally launched on January 18th 2001. Some of its 'sister' channels are 4seven, Film4, More4, and 4Music. 

Programs such as; Fresh Meat, The Inbetweeners, Rude Tube, Made In Chelsea, The Big Bang Theory, The Cleveland Show and Scrubs regularly run on E4. You can note none of these contain any serious themes and are all light hearted comedies.

Demographic means information the media uses to divide their audience into gender, age, race and other categories but it also pinpoints potential audiences. Every media product is targeted towards a certain audience, E4 is targeted towards predominantly young males between the ages of 16-24 but of course shows are produced and aired such as Made In Chelsea for a more female audience. They target this demographic because they broadcast good quality drama, comedy and have diverse entertainment formats making both E4 & E4 +1 have a very strong impact on 16-24 year old's. This demographic is mindful, sociable, they're heavy internet users, they love going out and tend to use advertising as one of their many information sources.

The secondary target audience will be young females between the ages of 16-34. Shows such us Desperate Housewives, Friends, Glee, Hollyoaks, Made in Chelsea, New Girl and Ugly Better will be aired to target this specific audience. You can notice as well a lot of these shows are aired mid-week in the day time when mums and house-wives will be home looking after children. Other channels owned by this broadcaster are; 4seven, Film4, More4 and 4Music. This are also generally targeted towards a younger age range.

An E Sting is an annual competition held by E4 where members of the public submit a 10 second self created animation. The clip can then be voted for on the E4 website by other people and the most popular clips get featured on the E4 channel on the intermission between commercial and TV show. Here are some examples:

My favorite of the examples is the first one listed "Family Esting". I thought this was the most creative animation because it bought characters to life. Even just being simple block logos with no faces or expressions, the creator was still able to bring them to life and give them personalities through small, simple props. For example; you are able to tell exactly who is the mother, father, son and daughter in the family. I think this is what animation is all about, being able to bring meaningless objects to life.

All clips are silly and light hearted, showing again that they would generally be targeted towards a younger audience that would find them amusing, rather than an older audience who might find them 'ridiculous' or 'irritating'.

Some of the preparation and planning I've already done has helped my respond the brief. For example I got an insight into different methods of animation and given an understanding of how they work.
I made some of my own to try out;

Here is the Lego video I made

I most enjoyed using the Lego in stop motion because it was the easiest method to bring a character to life whilst having little to no experience in animation. Being able to bring characters to life gave me the chance to be creative and come up with ideas I wouldn't of otherwise. The intention of using Lego the second time round was to attempt lip syncing with our characters. We had to draw the facial expressions for each sound, put them on our characters one by one and record the same speech to dub over. Mine & Nic's didn't work out amazingly well but for a first try we'll take it. I chose the soundtrack specifically because of its simplicity and light hearted feel. Having a young target audience, I think going for a fun feel good song matched the animation perfectly and the tempo of the song also happened to closely match the actions in the video.


Sources:

E4 Video 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVZZhCLtkg0
E4 Video 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0okzMbEBco
E4 Video 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_p8wJOYqZA