Research and Planning: E4 and the Brief

E4 is a TV channel owned by the Channel Four Television Corporation. It is a Freeview channel that launched on the 18th of January 2001. Since then its most successful broadcast was on the 11th of October 2010, when an episode of The Inbetweeners achieved over 3.7 million views.

E4 regularly shows episodes of the popular; The Big Bang Theory, Hollyoaks and How I Met Your Mother.

Their primary target audiences demographic is females between the age of 16-34. The reason behind this is because typically more women watch Hollyoaks, 2 Broke Girls and Made In Chelsea. however they do also target the male audience with shows such as Scrubs and The Inbetweeners. The typical demographic group that watches would also be classified as C2DE, the unemployed, students, casual worker up to skilled manual workers and blue collar workers. This is because, stereo-typically, middle class families wouldn't watch these kind of shows. The secondary target audience for E4 is males in the ABC1 category; the high managment, bankers, lawyers and other professionals as well as middle management, teachers and creative media people.

E4 also has a large number of "sister channels" which include Channel 4, Film4 and More4. These channels primary target audience also consist of people belonging to the C2DE category. Channel4 also targets men as  well as woman and More4 targets all adults.

An E Sting is a competition for budding animators to create an animation which features the E4 logo.



Genre: Comedy
Audience: Young Adults
Content: This ESting shows multiple pets in different roles in a medieval setting
Opinion: I thought it was quite clever and comedic on the different roles each animal had, cats being in charge while dogs are loyal guards.



Genre: Comedy
Audience: Young Adults
Content: A man makes lots of shadow puppets with a lot of hands
Opinion: The idea was quite creative and well executed. The shadows flowed well into one another and the ending was quite funny on how his hands were all twisted.



Genre: Comedy
Audience: Young Adults
Content: A "monster" enjoys London's main attractions
Opinion: It did look like the character was a part of London. The way the London eye moved looked genuine rather than edited.

To plan and prepare for our animation task we researched zoetropes, praxinoscopes and thaumatropes. We also created a short animation in groups, without a brief to follow. Creating the practice animation allowed me to see how much we would be able to fit into a 10 second animation and how many photos we would need. It also gave me an idea on what would be possible if we were to use an object compared to a human. We achieved this "bottle drop" animation by throwing a pepsi bottle the same way multiple times and capturing the image at different points. For when it rolls away we kept the camera the same distance away from the bottle but moved both forwards, making it look like it rolled away.




For my E-Sting I will create a human stop motion animation, I may also incorporate inanimate objects into the animation. The reason I have chosen human stop motion as the main style of animation is because I feel like it looks  impressive to have someone flying through the air and would have more possibilities on what could be created than with an object.

http://estings.e4.com/