The document provides a summary of the client Joe Duffy's evaluation of his research and planning process for a client project. Some key points: - His initial research PowerPoint covered various topics about the city of York to help decide the best option for his production, focusing more on some topics like landmarks over others like population and pollution. - His audience research looked at animation and media consumption trends for his target demographics, finding that shorter form videos on social media would work best. - His planning process involved mind maps of different ideas and experimenting with applying different styles like Monty Python and Kurzgesagt to sample animations to help decide the direction. - Testing out a Monty Python

1. Client Evaluation
Joe Duffy

2. Product Research
The Research PowerPoint for my Client Project was, in my opinion, done decently enough to help me
progress further in the project. First, I chose to research different topics correlating to the city of York
to help me decipher what the best option to pursue for production would be, in terms of interest for
an audience, amount of creativity I could use, with animation in mind and most importantly what I
would be excited to make as I work best when I am truly invested in making sure the Final Product is
the best I can make it, rather than not caring enough about it to even try.
I went at the research from different angles, with the history of York through its landmarks, its political
and environmental issues through pollution, the population and what the house prices are for those
people, and finally the nature and art found or produced here. I made sure to create a bibliography for
each page to make sure I knew what I was sourcing and whether I thought it was a legitimate place to
draw information from.
A downside I can see now is the very clear favoritism between the chosen subjects, with the
landmarks getting more slides than the rest of them, and nature and art getting more extensive
research than population and pollution. While I suppose there probably isn’t anything wrong with
focusing on the parts I feel stronger towards, I feel I should have tried to give a more even showing of
work rather than slack in certain areas to do more in others.

3. Audience Research
I merged my Audience Research with the former as I felt they both provided
inspiration for how I would go about my production. I believed that animation would
be primarily directed towards a younger audience, but I wanted my product to be
enjoyed by a slightly older audience too as an older demographic would be most
influenced to actually visit York.
As I am working with animation, I thought it would be a good place to focus,
researching what changes there have been with our consumption of it. To begin
with, I went broader than just animation, finding sources relating to how my
demographic of teenagers to young adults have used media, and what changes go
with new technology. This research greatly helped me with what type of content I
would end up making, even if it took a while to get there! This support was backed
up, once again, by providing a bibliography to check my sources were not false.

4. Audience Research
The first piece of information that ended up helping in the production was
the preferred style of media consuming, with younger people preferring
to enjoy media whenever they want as opposed to television's rigid
structure. This obviously meant that YouTube was the best route to take,
even if I was already going to choose it!! This is because, as my research
indicates, more people are choosing to view entertainment or news via
social media than official news broadcasts so I would realistically get more
traction through YouTube than TV.
Another thing I learned from the Audience Research is that many of my
demographic don’t watch long form media, with Ofcom suggesting they
only watch 2 minutes of news on TV on average. This told me that my
video had to be at maximum two minutes, perhaps needing to be even
shorter to coincide with the audience’s demands.

5. Audience Research
After looking into the general media, I took a detour from the medias to look at retro appeal. This is
because I was already forming ideas to do with Monty Python and wanted it to have some influence
for the project’s early stages to develop later. I understand that this is backwards in terms of the idea
generation this is supposed to be supporting, but I thought it would be odd to not at least mention it,
even if I didn’t end up using the idea. Thankfully, it also told me that now we live with most things
being digital, getting more tangible stuff is becoming trendier so that helped with the stop motion
aspect of my piece.
I finally got to analyzing the animation aspect of the Audience Research. I began with my own
experience, selecting YouTubers who gained a lot of traction with their animation use. I thought this
would help provide a style that would engross an audience as with the channels who have collected a
large following online. I found that exciting or interesting topics that can be given a lot to work with
visually become the most popular videos. I was particularly interested in Kurzgesagt as they had an
incredibly unique animation style which made the videos highly memorable, especially considering
their Science topics probably would have been unattractive to younger people otherwise. This was
also at a time when I didn’t know if a factual piece would be better to choose for my product so I was
invested in how I could do their style.

6. Audience Research
Next, I chose three animated shows which I believe have had impact on pop culture.
This was hard to write convincingly as I have only seen Rick & Morty, so my prior
knowledge of the other shows themes and messages mostly came from what I
heard other say and then some articles on them. Because of this, I doubt I truly got
as much support from some of the research I did in this last part as I would have if I
had watched the shows in question. Another admittedly point from this is that I
have dislike of the show Big Mouth as I believe it is crude for the sake of it and the
style isn’t for me so writing a compelling case for the appeal of it!! While I think it
was interesting to analyze these shows, by the end of the project their real use was
very little.

7. Audience Research
The final piece of Audience Research and Research I did overall was a small interview
based around media. I kept the questions very broad so the person could answer
without being felt they were being pushed a specific direction. This was somewhat
helpful as it told me social media was used a lot during the day and that, according to
this person, animation videos can be funny when unexpected things happen which I
hopefully incorporated into the final products. However I know my data could have
been improved upon if I did multiple interviews as I could get a better indication of
what certain demographics enjoy rather than hope a collective of people enjoy the
same things as one person.
Overall, I would say that my Research document was successful in laying the
groundwork for what I would end up choosing to do in my final product, providing
multiple avenues to go with my project in terms of style and theming. I probably
could have embellished more upon certain points to provide a more leveled
assessment of each section, but I believe my early bias for certain areas did help me
narrow down what I wanted to do, which is important as I know I am very indecisive!

8. Planning
Planning had quite a slow start I’ll be honest. This is because, while I had narrowed down my options from
the Research PowerPoint, I still had plenty of work to do in order to be confident in how to proceed. This
meant the first slide, being the Project Concept, was done much later in the planning phase!
The mind map I made was to lay out all the ideas I had so I could feel less confused by all of them.
Realistically my main two choices were either Nature or Landmarks in topic, but in what style, with Monty
Python or Kurzgesagt, and theme, them being factual or comedic, was till up for contention. I decided to
embellish upon my mind map by adding the History portion which could link to the Landmarks and factual
style or try to style into a, sometimes dark, comedy relating to people like Dick Turpin or the Vikings. I later
added the stop-motion segment as I was weighing the pros and cons for the method but soon realized it was
already mentioned for the Landmarks part, so I just connected them! The map itself was easy to understand
as each part was colour coordinated and I tried to keep each arrow as clear of colliding with others or being
hidden by boxes so I could see exactly where each strand went. I probably could have tried to add more to
the bottom two in terms of how they would be made into products, especially Stop-Motion but I was
confident the top two were my final destinations, so I put a lot more thought into them. I also decided to
give each section their own slide so they could be clearly visible instead of all being on one page.

9. Planning
I decided that instead of trying to decipher what would be the best route by blanking staring at my
options, I went ahead and started experimenting with all the ideas. Looking back at it, it feels like I
was putting labels together to see what worked best together. I used Photoshop and put a Monty
Python style Nature piece using York Artist Mark Hearld’s animal art. I created a simple loop of a Fox
chasing a Pigeon, two York animals, which was very effective and had subtle humour in that you
couldn’t tell who was chasing who. I also learned a new technique where you could content aware a
part of the image so I could take the Fox out of the background which was a major discovery.
However I think the transition from the bottom of the page to the top isn’t crazy smooth but that’s
because I didn’t have that planned out to begin with.
I then chose to see how I would replicate the Kurzgesagt style, so I didn’t just fall into one train of
thought without testing out my other ideas. I decided to stick with my Fox so I could compare the
different techniques easier. Sadly, the creation process was a lot tougher than I hoping even if the
final Fox design was very good in my opinion. On top of that, I would have to use After Effects to get
the smooth movement of the creatures which I have only used once before. In other words, at least
I knew Monty Python was the way to go!

10. Planning
What I think is one of the funniest and most stress inducing parts of the project came when the teacher
next door asked what I was planning, and I said it would be Monty Python styled and showed my Fox
chase sequence. Not intentionally, I hope, the teacher took that it meant I was doing full cut-out stop
motion and said I should check out the Python animator’s work. I WAS planning on settling on
Photoshop, as while I had thought of literal paper, I thought I would be a lot more comfortable doing it
on Photoshop. But as I am so unconfident to contradict the teacher, I just went with the fact I was doing
it with my hands. It was a good thing in the end as I could put practice into something new, although it
certainly made the production harder, that’s for sure!!!
With my decision on style made, I had to practice it on, you guessed it, a Fox who was chasing a Pheasant
this time! This was because I didn’t know how to approach my first stop motion since probably Primary
School so I needed a simple idea that wouldn’t take up too much time. Other than the printing debacle
that plagued me until the end of the project where I could send my images to the printer from my
computer simply, I would say the experiment went successfully. I learned to be vigilant about what
moved in each frame as there were spots where one of the animals hadn’t moved and I adapted to the
awkward set up which, while still proving to be annoying during production, wasn’t a complete pain all
the way through. The experiment made me feel more confident with the style but what topic and
theming I would use were still on the table.

11. Planning
I eventually decided that the Nature topic would only work well with the Kurzgesagt style, as
I would want the animals to have more flow if they were the main focus which I couldn’t
present with my chosen style. This left me with Landmarks being my chosen topic with only
the theme in which I would make it under question. I made a Word document where, like my
mind map, I could throw my many ideas onto in a concise format. This was somewhat
helpful although I think after writing it all, my ideas are quite hard to read, even with the
bold text. I concluded that I could have more creative license by making the video more
comedic as a factual piece felt like too hard of a task to keep up the entertainment value.
With the list of ideas for my product, I tried to keep most, if not all, of the main features
relating to York even if the context they were in made no sense. I also decided I would do
smaller separate pieces in this time as I thought the style of video would accommodate for
snappy movement in an isolated space.

12. Planning
One evening, I decided to see if one of my jotted ideas would work and not look
utterly stupid, in a bad way I mean so I put together a very rushed version one of my
final products on Photoshop. It was at that point I realised the plan could really work
as the practice was so utterly ridiculous, it worked perfectly. I then went through my
ideas list to get interesting concepts that would be fun to watch and were not too
tricky in concept to attempt.
In my PowerPoint, I then went on to describe how my Audience would find appeal in
this. I must admit my reasoning here doesn’t feel all that strong but that’s mostly
due to me not knowing how any group would truly react to this kind of video. I had
mostly educated guesses for particular reactions which is fine, and I am surprised I
didn’t lose confidence because of my guess work which is good!!

13. Planning
I then went on to do a more detailed description of my selected ideas which were what I had to base my
actual production on as I had written these pieces REALLY close to the production period. In hindsight
these descriptions do leave a lot to the imagination when in actual production so I could have done with
more time going into the intricacies of how they would work, not just on a story standpoint, but also a
technical view. Still, all in all, this section of the document was really helpful for organizing what I needed
to print with images to provide a visual aid, and how and when it would come into play. I did come back
to this section to add parts that I added in the production time so the description made sense which I’m
not entirely sure I should do but I thought I should to give the PowerPoint more sense.
The next part of my Planning was listing all the resources I would need for the project. It was pretty self-
explanatory so didn’t serve as a crutch for me to need when going through production and since I was
doing everything in College, I didn’t require to book any of the kit. So this was probably the least useful
part of the PowerPoint for me personally, but for an observer, it was probably helpful to know what
equipment I would be utilizing.
The Contingency Plan was really simple to make. All I had to was find another plan I had made, replicate
the most important pieces, and then add ones that would directly influence this project. Thankfully, I
didn’t need to use this plan during my production process!

14. Planning
The next area to plan out was very important as I needed to list down the audio I would need for my
videos. This was somewhat tricky as the aforementioned descriptions were not written with the sound in
mind so I had to play each piece out in my head to see where the most substantial sounds would come
from. I decided that using tables would be the easiest and most effective way to portray what and how I
would get the sounds, as well as what narrative purpose they would serve. The fact I gave each video
their own slide also helped with the clarity of this area of Planning. These three key points allowed me to
thoroughly think about how essential each piece of audio I needed was and what I would do to create
them. A thing I did with this version of the Audio description that I hadn’t done with previous projects
was given a little more detail, and with a more personal tone to show my engagement to each sound,
rather than just give a simple note that wasn’t slightly memorable or make the sound feel truly
interesting, if that make sense! Although, going forward in the project, I did have to add sounds when I
realized a part of the story didn’t feel right without audio so perhaps I didn’t prepare fully from the start,
or maybe I just didn’t anticipate the amount of sound design I would need so I suppose that counts as a
negative. It seems I also underestimated my own ability to do folly sound as quite a few of the creation
parts suggest using computer found sound. When it came to it however, I did manage to make most of
the sounds myself so the “How it’s made” probably could have done with some more creativity and
positivity!

15. Planning
Health and Safety were in the same boat as Contingency as in I could just replicate
any issues, I felt were liable in this project from former projects and add any new
problems that could arise during production, along with an adequate response to
said issue. I also found I could adapt the counter to the older issues by tweaking
them so the fit better within this project, by having back aches that were only
focused on how you sat by the computer, now be influenced by your position for
moving the paper. I think this benefits the piece as I can directly link the older
issues with newer potential risks, showing my awareness.

16. Time Management
I thought I would complete the Planning PowerPoint work here as the final part is the
Production Schedule. Despite the decent amount of content I put in each week, this
was probably the least useful schedule I have made yet. The reason for this is because I
was making a stop-motion piece which is something I had never done before. Because
of this, I had no idea how long any of the production would actually be so I could only
take guesses as to what I would be doing at certain points and how long it would take to
produce. I would say that considering it was mostly guesswork, the timetable seems
justifiable and it wouldn’t be ridiculous to believe I could do it in the timeframe. But
unfortunately for me, the process was quite a bit slower and nerve-racking than I would
have hoped. Perhaps, unlike my Audio, I should have been more negative this time
round! Anyway, once I was out of sync with the schedule, there was no way I was going
to get back in line with it, so it did lose its effectiveness.

17. Time Management
On the subject of being slower, let’s talk about it. Our overall week plan doesn’t
make my own production a simple task. With prior projects, it has been done all via
computer, so my work was accessible whenever and wherever. But since I was doing
stop motion, I was locked in a single room and couldn’t come in as I pleased, at least
not at the start. We were off on Mondays, had the Tuesday morning doing the
Research Project, was put in another classroom and had a session off in the
afternoon, had Wednesday off, had a full Thursday and missed the first lesson of
Friday as well as losing two of them for training and ASFF. This meant that if I didn’t
use any breaks or come in on lessons I wasn’t meant to be in for, which I ended up
doing, I only had 54 hours to do all the production. And I mean all for I couldn’t even
use Premiere outside a classroom because for some reason, it was removed from the
Library. This process wasn’t made any easier by my Week Three flu which made me
give up Tuesday to recover despite the overwhelming time pressure coming to haunt
me! To combat all of this, I chose to stay in the classroom on breaks for most of the
project and my Tutor allowed me access to the room on my free days so I could add
more hours on my limited time.

18. Time Management
I am not entirely sure what part of the production was the most time consuming. I think the Chocolate
Orange debacle certainly didn’t help matters, when I had to basically use up a lesson, trying to find a
way to put the food under a hill without any dangerous methods to do so. I suppose, coming back to the
video descriptions, as I hadn’t written anything for the technical side of the products, I spent a fair
amount of time in production trying to produce solutions on the spot and hoping it would go to plan. I
had to cut out one of the four videos but honestly, I was probably least confident in it as I found the
humour didn’t land too well. This still left me with me with little time for the remaining three.
Somewhat of a saving grace was the holiday we had before the last week. In this time I was able to focus
on the audio, which would have been near impossible to do otherwise. However, it came as a hindrance
to my actual animation since I has midway through my last piece before I left it for a week so I couldn’t
complete it and I had to take guesses for how long the audio had to be.
Despite all the struggles I had to overcome, I would say my perseverance, one of few qualities I
sometimes have, made the time management, while certainly not too fun, pretty satisfying to push
through and complete all my work. I think my Reflection does enough to show how much work I had to
do on sometimes single days, but I won’t get into that right now. Overall, while initially it could be
planned a lot better, I am glad I have the ability to overcome such challenges if I know I can.

19. Production Reflection
I’ll try to be more concise about my Reflection than in that PowerPoint, but that’s hardly
difficult! The most obvious thing to point out about the document is the attention to detail I go
to on each part of the production. I am unsure as to whether I believe this is a positive as it
shows I put a lot of thought into my processes, or a negative, as I couldn’t keep my writing
concise and went over the top with it. I like to think, like with this Evaluation, it’s the former but
I can understand the other side too. I like that, for the most part, I was able to add my own
opinions to the structure while keeping it flowing so it didn’t seem entirely bland and generic
along with the consistent imagery that matches decently well with each slide. I say decently as
on Week Three, since I was inactive, I sort of reused images from before which only slightly
related with this current affairs, but it would have been odd to have no pictures on one slide. On
the topic of images, I feel that, especially with the Premiere ones, it was tricky to convey what
the image was correlating with in the description clearly which was fairly annoying. On the other
hand, I showed different kinds of pictures, with the equipment and its surrounding also getting
shown and not just the product itself.

20. Production Reflection
As I had a lot of production to do, I couldn’t use the last half hour to write up my Reflection as that probably
wouldn’t be enough time to write it all and I needed that time to produce. Instead, I would write notes during the
work on my phone which I would elaborate on in my free time after College, fun right?! I would try to keep up with
the notes but nearing the end I had an insane amount of notes and would be behind by a full week at times. The
last week was so full of production, I couldn’t bring myself to fully write out the notes, so I made a slide to describe
the predicament and the solution. This solution was to just put the notes on the document which was crude and a
little frustrating as my own flourishes were not as noticeable, but I would rather show something for my Reflection
than nothing at all. I also did this with the Audio because of time restraints but thankfully the list format didn’t feel
like a hindrance, being very informative of my process to do these pieces. However, the images didn’t all line up as
the ones I had all fit to the first slide but I decided to share them out, and I made an extra slide to inform the
context behind the list as well as warn that not all the sounds were put in the list since they were made during the
final parts of production.
Overall, I am proud of the Production Reflection as I believe you should detail the production as much as you can to
make sure the reader can easily follow your work, rather than have to decipher what you did themselves. This goes
the same for opinions on the production as it’s important to know how each part of the production affects you and
what you can do in future to feel better about points that made you feel negative about the project.

21. Pros About Production
The first pro about the products for me was that I got to learn how to use another
animation technique which, while challenging, was enjoyable to do well and
especially being able to overcome any problems I faced during it. It was also fun
coming up with absurd ideas for my videos without really thinking about the
technical side of it, just the fun side of it. As I mentioned before, thinking in my
toes was scary but satisfying to get an answer to. For example, reversing the Yorkie
shots on the Goose so it could get smaller through practical means was great, as
well as making the Orange transition onto the Sun Dial of the map when I realized
only the crowd could disappear. As I just said, I appreciated that I did all the visuals
practically, and didn’t need any computer-generated effects for how each part
moved, only for the colouring on certain sections. Getting all the audio was also
more fun than I anticipated as I had to be pretty inventive with some sounds I
needed. For example, I poured water from a massive bowl to replicate a crashing
wave which worked surprisingly well. Naturally completing each video was a great
feeling as I had spent so much time on each. I had to constantly tweak the audio,
in length and loudness so getting that just right was satisfactory and bringing all
my photos to life made the long process of taking them worth it as I could see my
idea play out not just in my head!

22. Cons About Production
My least favorite thing about the production period was how ridiculously short it
felt. I felt like I was constantly trying to keep up and had to use way too much of my
free time having to come in just so I might not fail the project which made a lot of it
feel less than enjoyable. The fact the Library computers uninstalled Premiere over
the Summer seems utterly moronic to me to, I don’t understand why updating them
would decrease the amount of content they have, and it just made my situation far
more difficult than it had to be. The camera also created an unnerving situation
where it would randomly select what angle the picture would be set at so I would
have to take pictures of the same frame again and again, hoping it would go the right
side up. Premiere also acted in a frustrating manner, sometimes malfunctioning so I
couldn’t drag files around or even see the video itself, resulting in multiple resets
just to get it working. There was even the case of it straight up crashing, so I lost
some work which was tedious to redo. It also didn’t help that the program found it
difficult to not lag out, so to make sure all the audio was timed correctly on my final
video, I had to keep exporting the product to see it smoothly. Most of the cons came
from hindrances that I had barely any control over and just had to “deal with it”
which isn’t how I should have to do anything, especially products that go towards my
UCAS points.