Monday, 24 October 2016

At this stage in our planning, we felt our film needed a name, and a logo that could effectively represent it as a product. The sake of a logo is to create a symbol or design that can represent an entity effectively, in our case, making our product identifiable, while carrying connotations of what our film sets out to achieve. I decided to use the Breakfast font, for its untempered, base aesthetic.

With a now concrete idea of what our film would set out to achieve visually, we decided we needed a name that resonated this same, uncensored visual. For this, we chose "Trabaho" The Filipino word for 'work'.

The simplicity of a one word title emphasized our already visual connotations, while we felt the use of the native Filipino language was only natural considering the subject.

From this, I set out to personalize the logo, making three variants, all of which having similar styles for the sake of branding across their potential uses.

Design 1: Trabaho Vertical

Usage: Website, Watermark, Postcard

Design 2: Trabaho Chain Motif

Usage: Film Logo, Watermark

Design 3: Trabaho Drip Decal

Usage: Graphic, Website, Watermark

Audience Research 3: Audience Profile

Audience Profile

Our film is aimed at an age group ranging from 16-45 year olds (quite open), with no emphasis on a specific race, class or gender.

Thes is Bob. Bob is a 19 year old young adult who spends the majority of his free time watching documentaries. His favourites are Vice and Real Stories. Bob chooses the films he watches based on their subject matter, which in this case is the insight into the daily lives of people with strongly contrasting lifestyles. Large amounts of work limit Bob's free time, which is why he prefers films that are short (lasting from 5 to 10 minutes).

Audience Research 2: Focus Group

Audience Research: Focus Group

After the success of our previous audience research we decided it would be a good idea to see how our audience reacted when watching a brief documentary film based around the same subject matter a our own, we saw that the questionare was accurate as the responses given seemed to correspond with the date previously collected. The subjects chosen were of a similar age to us and they seemed to be very excited to see the finished project upon completion.

Audience Research: Questionare

Understanding our Audience: Questionnaire Results

To develop further understanding of those who would be interested in our film, our group conducted an online questionnaire, the hope oh which was to answer questions we felt would be beneficial to the creation of our product. The questionnaire was conducted through google forms, and was made public through Facebook to the collective pool of our groups friends lists. Since sharing the questionnaire, we've tallied a total of 76 results, all through totally virtual anonymity as to preserve peoples natural feelings towards the questions, rather than create bias through fear of offending us.

Depending on how we intend to use gender theories (Mulvey's male gaze for example) in our product, the importance of this particular question could vary, however, as our results have led to an almost 50-50 split, we feel to not use a coalescence of what appeals to both men and women would be to undermine the full potential audience of our film.

Interestingly, albeit having no 15 year olds or under on my Facebook, it still managed to be the second most popular category. In this moment, a fault of online surveying is highlighted, this being the ability to more openly lie or mess around. To counteract this, I feel simply rounding up this 10.5% to be apart of the larger 16-20 majority will provide a more accurate result. Even without this alteration to the results, the 16 - 20 age range is our largest potential audience range by a landslide. This result mirrors what we expected, with the majority of media we've analysed so far seeming to appeal to this modern, younger audience.

For this question, we felt a distinction between subscription based services and online streaming were necessary, as much as some would argue otherwise due to an overlap between the two, we as a group felt there was more to streaming, both legal and illegal. Surprisingly, in cinema viewing came out as the most popular option, with nearly everyone agreeing to it being a way they choose to watch films. Because of this result, our group shall make strides in creating a look to our film worthy of in cinema viewing, but with the rooted aesthetic of something more at home to the world of online streaming.

From a general perspective, there was little use for this question, however, with the ability to look at individual responses to our questionnaire, we felt it could be interesting to return to this question, and see how those who lacked an interest in film answered other questions in the survey. This is something I very much intend to return to, as I feel there could potentially be a correlation between some of our results, and those who don't have an interest in film.

The sake of this question was to understand priority in our audience, with time being as valuable as it is, we felt it beneficial to understand what kind of attention span we should be producing to. Fortunately enough, a resounding amount of our audience chose either weekly, or even daily, making a window for our short film very much viable.

A honed continuation of the logic behind the previous question, the results to this question only perpetuate the answer we had hoped for. That being that an interest in online content is prevalent, and thus the platform through which we were intending to present our film is very much suitable.

As a group, we were content with these results, resonating our hopes for critical, thinking audience, with the majority open to the idea, and the second most popular grouping saying they would outwardly be interested based on the premise alone.

An overall positive response, with most pledging to the idea working to good effect, and the second largest group believing it would work very well. Typical complaints of the media tended to be people believing it would be too short, and not truly encompass the subject.

Another majorly positive response, looking into our results, I found the same 4 that put a 1 for this question, also answered a 1 for the previous, leading me to believe there could be a minority purposefully skewing the results, this aside, we're content in moving forward with out idea.

There was some interest into this question, because of which an elaboration was provided. To create a strong narrative is not to eliminate fact. Using the popular tv show Viking as an example, Ragnar Lothbrok, the protagonist of the show, is not a real character in history, but rather the convergence of multiple real life characters into one for the sake of a more fleshed out narrative. In wanting to create a stronger narrative, our intention was to take the real life trials and tribulations of our cast members, and bring them together into a narrative that would allow us to highlight there realities within the space of a short documentary. Ultimately this was the second most agreed upon option, with a perfect compromise of both fact and narrative being the agreed upon best way forward.

The expected outcome of this question, the majority (everyone in fact) agree'd to frequenting YouTube, with the other options all coming in at relatively similar frequencies. Considering the accessibility of these platforms, YouTube especially, it would make sense to promote our film through YouTube primarily, and then sites such as Vimeo secondarily.

In photography, a monochromatic colour scheme can be utilized to draw attention to the texture and lightplay of the film, removing the distraction of color entirely. To the standard audience, this seems like an unimportant change, but with this in mind, we felt it would be interesting to see who felt an affinity to the palette without reasoning as to why.

CONCLUSION

Overall we learnt what we had hoped to from our audience, and shall continue on producing our film with this knowledge in mind.