Animated Smarties Advert
This is my final project; an animated Smarties advert for channel E4 using stop-motion animation.
This advert is about a boy within the target audience of 16 - 34 year olds that goes to the shops and buys some Smarties. He then finds his way to a bench and eats the Smarties, this is the naturalistic part of the sequence. After swallowing his imagination runs wild and he has a dream about Smarties coming to life, this is the surreal aspect of the sequence. He then wakes up to find it is later on in the day and he leaves rather confused with the rest of the Smarties, and the sequence is back to its naturalistic form. The end contains a shot of the bench and the Smarties and the empty boxes appearing all over the bench in a slightly surreal fashion but the shot is still in the real world, which connotes the power of the Smarties blurring the line between surrealism and the real world.
Smarties wasn't our original product to advertise, we were going to use baked beans but we thought they would be messy to work with and ruin the continuity of the piece, also there was the worry that they would expire and go mouldy which wouldn't appeal to our consumers. Then we thought more about sweets and we had the same problems with continuity and individual sweet characteristics as well as their target audience. Eventually we decided upon Smarties because they have a wide audience, they are simple which personifies our style of animation and are brightly coloured which will catch the audiences attention.
Jack as our camera man / director of photography and main actor, he wasn't using the camera all of the time. However he did make it clear that he wanted to have a variety of shots to describe each scene. The beginning of our advert contained mainly long and establishing shots to set the scene and show the audience what Jack was doing. Then we moved further on to the product placement scene, in which mainly involved mid shots, close ups and extreme close ups to catch his experession and get a clear view of the product to act as a subliminal message that 'Smarties are tasty'. During the Smarties dream the camera was stationary the whole time and showed a close up shot of the Smarties 'coming to life' using persistence of vision to create the illusion of movement. This scene was brightened and had the saturation increased to give it more of a happy and surreal tone. As Jack woke from the dream using a range of mid shots, close ups and long shots he left wondering if it was in fact real. This scene was darkened and contrasted slightly to give the illusion that time had passed. Finally the last scene of the bench was shot using a long shot which zoomed into a close up and left the advert pausing on the product to entise the consumer into buying the smarties. This scene was also highly saturated but not brightened to keep the continuity of the piece but also to attract attention to the smarties.
The sound effects were meant to be quite cheesy and rugged to match the stop-motion animation style. This featured multiple walking sounds whether it was on concrete or on dirt the sound effects were different. As well as different eating and munching sounds coupled with gulping and gasping noises to make it seem realistic. There were also Smatie shaking noises that were produced from different meraccas to get different sounds that were then fitted in well amongst the stop-motion animation. To show that time had passed in the second half of the advert I overlapped the constant background noise track with one that was especially for night / evening sounds, including crickets and extra wind, I also included an owl hooting to expand the night time feel. Lastly, the ending with the Smarties on the bench had popping sound effects to go along with the appearing Smarties which added a comic effect to it, also the 'Yay!' at the end was to connote that anyone can act like a child when eating Smarties which is also what the entire advert is about.
The advertisement we have created is ruggedly made and makes the audience stop and think how it was actually made. This would be a similar style to Nokia's advert for their phone that was also made with stop-motion animation. Both of these adverts have been roughly created and were both made by students, though the 'Gulp' advert was directed and and edited by Aardman animations.
The majority of people said that the Nokia advert was effective and really enjoyed it "This is incredible. One of the best stop motion videos on youtube. This must have took a lot of patience." commented one youtuber. Which is what multiple people appreciated about ours.
Smarties wasn't our original product to advertise, we were going to use baked beans but we thought they would be messy to work with and ruin the continuity of the piece, also there was the worry that they would expire and go mouldy which wouldn't appeal to our consumers. Then we thought more about sweets and we had the same problems with continuity and individual sweet characteristics as well as their target audience. Eventually we decided upon Smarties because they have a wide audience, they are simple which personifies our style of animation and are brightly coloured which will catch the audiences attention.
Jack as our camera man / director of photography and main actor, he wasn't using the camera all of the time. However he did make it clear that he wanted to have a variety of shots to describe each scene. The beginning of our advert contained mainly long and establishing shots to set the scene and show the audience what Jack was doing. Then we moved further on to the product placement scene, in which mainly involved mid shots, close ups and extreme close ups to catch his experession and get a clear view of the product to act as a subliminal message that 'Smarties are tasty'. During the Smarties dream the camera was stationary the whole time and showed a close up shot of the Smarties 'coming to life' using persistence of vision to create the illusion of movement. This scene was brightened and had the saturation increased to give it more of a happy and surreal tone. As Jack woke from the dream using a range of mid shots, close ups and long shots he left wondering if it was in fact real. This scene was darkened and contrasted slightly to give the illusion that time had passed. Finally the last scene of the bench was shot using a long shot which zoomed into a close up and left the advert pausing on the product to entise the consumer into buying the smarties. This scene was also highly saturated but not brightened to keep the continuity of the piece but also to attract attention to the smarties.
The sound effects were meant to be quite cheesy and rugged to match the stop-motion animation style. This featured multiple walking sounds whether it was on concrete or on dirt the sound effects were different. As well as different eating and munching sounds coupled with gulping and gasping noises to make it seem realistic. There were also Smatie shaking noises that were produced from different meraccas to get different sounds that were then fitted in well amongst the stop-motion animation. To show that time had passed in the second half of the advert I overlapped the constant background noise track with one that was especially for night / evening sounds, including crickets and extra wind, I also included an owl hooting to expand the night time feel. Lastly, the ending with the Smarties on the bench had popping sound effects to go along with the appearing Smarties which added a comic effect to it, also the 'Yay!' at the end was to connote that anyone can act like a child when eating Smarties which is also what the entire advert is about.
The advertisement we have created is ruggedly made and makes the audience stop and think how it was actually made. This would be a similar style to Nokia's advert for their phone that was also made with stop-motion animation. Both of these adverts have been roughly created and were both made by students, though the 'Gulp' advert was directed and and edited by Aardman animations.
The majority of people said that the Nokia advert was effective and really enjoyed it "This is incredible. One of the best stop motion videos on youtube. This must have took a lot of patience." commented one youtuber. Which is what multiple people appreciated about ours.
For this advert I created the soundtrack, animated and edited it, finalising all of our efforts for the project in this video. The soundtrack was created in garageband, the many thousand of images were taken on a canon DSLR camera and the final project was pulled together in final cut pro.
Our project group all had different tasks that we all achieved which contributed to our final piece. I thought that the tasks we were given in the roles and responsibilities were chosen well because they reflected what we were like and what we excelled at individually. All of us as a group worked well on our individual tasks and the product of our genius is in this video.
The focus group we had that was giving us feedback told us their thoughts on the advertisement. Many thought that the soundtrack was catchy but a few people found it childish for our target audience of 16 - 34 year olds. Many people found that our story line was really effective and 9 out of 10 people thought that they could see it as a genuine advert shown on TV. Also everyone liked the idea of stop-motion animation and thought it was quirky and original. Overall I was pleased with this feedback and took the constructive criticism on board.
I thought that we could have improved by taking more shots so that if more than one went wrong then we had backups. Also our structure was heavily based on Jack walking around and I'd have preferred more of our final piece to be centred on the smarties. Lastly I found that the editing process didn't differentiate the real world and the dream world as much as I'd hoped but the boundary between an effective piece and an overly cheesy piece was very blurred and many people had different opinions about our work.
To conclude, I am proud of our final project and I believe that I contributed my fair amount and I am very pleased with the final result.
The focus group we had that was giving us feedback told us their thoughts on the advertisement. Many thought that the soundtrack was catchy but a few people found it childish for our target audience of 16 - 34 year olds. Many people found that our story line was really effective and 9 out of 10 people thought that they could see it as a genuine advert shown on TV. Also everyone liked the idea of stop-motion animation and thought it was quirky and original. Overall I was pleased with this feedback and took the constructive criticism on board.
I thought that we could have improved by taking more shots so that if more than one went wrong then we had backups. Also our structure was heavily based on Jack walking around and I'd have preferred more of our final piece to be centred on the smarties. Lastly I found that the editing process didn't differentiate the real world and the dream world as much as I'd hoped but the boundary between an effective piece and an overly cheesy piece was very blurred and many people had different opinions about our work.
To conclude, I am proud of our final project and I believe that I contributed my fair amount and I am very pleased with the final result.
Feedback
From the feedback we received, people mainly thought that our advertisement was good overall but needed a bit of smoothening out and perfecting. "With a bit of work I could see it as an actual advert." This means eradicating errors and making a completely smooth and ideal advert that can be shown to the public.
Some thought that our soundtrack was "slightly childish but could also work for your target audience." Therefore we thought that we could expand our target audience to widen our consumer market and make our advert more well known.
A lot of people thought that the shots were a bit odd in places "It jumps from one shot to a completely different one." which interrupts the continuity slightly. We mainly blame that on our camera which wasn't exactly studio quality but it did the job. If we could go back we would have taken more shots to minimise errors like his.
Questions:
-What are your thoughts on the animation?
-From the advert which elements stand out the best?
-What are your thoughts on the soundtrack / sound effects, in terms of meeting our target audience?
-Do you think the soundtrack is easy to remember?
-Do you feel the Smarties were well advertised?
-Can you comment on the overall structure and story of the advert?
-Could you spot any areas of weakness, or suggest any improvements?
-Do you have any comments on the camera work?
-Could you see this advert being shown on the TV and why?
I wrote:
"Dear E4,
Promoting our Video
I sent our video to E4 and asked them to take a look and give us some constructive criticism.
I wrote:
"Dear E4,
I'm a media student currently working on stop-motion animation and as a group we have made an advert for Smarties which we designed for an E4 target audience. I would be very grateful if you could take a look at it and give us some feedback or constructive criticism? We needed to send off and promote our advertisements through competitions, our target audience and designated channel. We chose your channel as our designated advertisement channel because of your surreal and quirky shows, idents and adverts, and our Smarties advertisement fits in with our target audience similarly. It would mean a lot to me if you told me what you think
Thank you very much.
Yours sincerely,
- Abi Jarvis from Esher college -"
I hope that E4 do reply to my email and that they will tell me what they think about our advert. I hope to get some criticism and hopefully some good points, this will help me understand E4 as a channel and what they are looking for in advertisements. This will further my knowledge about what channels want in the advertisements that they show.
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