1. Research Proposal
To: Felix Goldberg
From:Ben Davis
Date: 15
th
March 2014
Subject: Research Proposal
Proposed Research Topic:
I am intending to research into the purpose of idents and their relevance within the
television industry, particularly the channel E4. I will be doing this by creating numerous
surveys for a ranging audience. By doing this I will be able to find out details that
indicate E4’s target audience, for instance, I will find out the general age range that is
the most likely to be watching E4, the gender of the majority of people who watch it and
weather or not they like the Ident ideas itself. I will also be getting my research by
looking into other idents from different channels, comparing and contrasting to get a
general idea of what The Idents purpose is.
Purposes:
The purpose behind my research is to figure out the most efficient and easiest way to
create and effective and appropriate ident for the television channel E4. I hope to have
a 15 second ident that will attract E4’s target audience, displayed to me by their
corporate identity theory. The purpose of my research is to find out who exactly is the
target audience, and then I can come up with my idea based around that. I will be doing
research to find out the corporate identity theory of E4, and within that the types of
things they broadcast and when.
Background
From my research E4’s current ident design consists of a main comedy theme. The
colour they use is generally purple, which is also stated on their Style Guide. The
colour fits within the target audience they have, so I will be keeping the same colour. All
of their idents appear to have child like humour, and because of the hour of which the
idents are shown they have to be family friendly. I noticed the adult humour started
after 9pm, indicating that E4 are flexible in what they broadcast, this also applied to
their ident range, before 9pm, they were all child friendly and afterwards there was
more adult humour involved.
Scope:
In terms of production, I will invest a total of 10 hours into the process of my research. I
will spend around 2 hours on creating a survey for people to answer, and a further 3
2. hours letting a chosen group of people answer it. I plan to make this take place on the
23
rd
of March 2014, at 10am – 1pm. There will be 30 participants taking part in the
survey, enabling me to get a wide variety of statistics. I will also interview a very
specific focus group of people, asking them certain questions to do with the topic. With
this I will find out who likes what and that sort of thing.
Method:
I will begin by contacting the people I would like to take part in my survey, ensuring it is
a wide range of people, different in age and gender. I will attach a document, which will
have the survey on, and I will request the subjects to email me the survey back as soon
as possible. Afterwards I will collate all of the data and create numerous graphs and pie
charts helping me find different things out about the channel E4. The survey will be
created and taken place on survey monkey. When interviewing I will make sure it is
face to face to get a much more personal and true reaction from the interviewee. Also I
will be getting focus group in class notes, this will help my research significantly as they
are all of the right age range.
Timetable:
Prepare Proposal by: 23/4/14
Complete literature review by: 25/4/14
Complete Fieldwork by: 30/4/14
Complete analysis by: 3/5/14
Give presentation on: 6/5/14
Complete final report by: 14/5/14
Limitations:
Limitations include things like date and time I can shoot, because of the fact that it is a
school I can only film out of school hours, but if I wait until after the lighting will not be
sufficient. If I tried to film on a weekend I wouldn’t be able to get the staff necessary to
complete this, seeing as everyone will want a day off. So I will have to leave all of the
filming to a school holiday, which again could be a struggle because of members of the
crew perhaps being on holiday. In terms of my interviews it could be limiting to get a
broad enough selection of people to give me a fair result, which can only be avoided by
selecting more people to interview.
