ESting Evaluation

My ESting, it could be argued, was the most problematic of our group. There were a lot of issues and problems that arose during the production of mine that weren't necessarily present in others, most infamously the time issues - but I will discuss that further down. As far as other constraints were concerned I wasn't too bad off, although I very nearly ran into some financial trouble wherein I nearly ran out of post-it notes but that resolved itself as I had just enough. Legally and regulatory-wise I had next to no hiccups; I'm pretty sure Post-It doesn't claim IP theft if their product is used in such a way as this.

Now, the main issue. Time management is an interesting problem with my ESting because while I did take around 3 weeks longer than everyone else to finish, it's not at fault of my time management. Rather, I was simply too ambitious with my idea. It started off in earnest, but I don't think I quite realised that projects like my own take a very very long time between frames, and by the time I realised that it was too late to go back and start a simpler idea. The time-frame for this project was between just before christmas and a week after. We had around 6-8 lessons to complete it in full. I, however, took those 8 lessons plus around 20-30+ hours out of class to finish filming. Even though I took longer than everyone else, I still wouldn't say I failed to manage my time correctly since I did spend the vast majority of my free time on the project during its production.

The actual brief specified that the animation had to be 10 seconds long,. had to feature the E4 logo at some point throughout and had to use one of their audiobeds. As far as this is concerned I fulfilled this brief to a tee

Sadly a major component of a lot of briefs is what's known as a 'deadline', and I did not fulfil this. At all. See above.

I got feedback for my ESting by making a questionnaire and posting it on various social media websites. I got around 38 responses. The general consensus was that it was of high quality, but there was the occasional nitpicker.

As you can see, there was a wide range of age groups providing their responses here. Most of them were between the ages of 15 and 19 - aptly the sort of age range that E4 aims for.

Gender-wise I can't provide a graph as they were text-based answers. There were around 28 males and 7 females answering the questionnaire.

Seems like a majority of our questionnaire-takers don't know what an ESting is.  This may be because I posted the questionnaire to Reddit - it's quite an americentric website and I doubt people will have heard of them across the pond. This being said I don't think everyone here in England knows what they are either.

Do you know what type of animation this is?

The next question asked whether they knew what type of animation this was. Nearly everyone knew what it was, save for 5 or 6 people who didn't.

Do you think it 'works' visually? Does it all look nice?

Generally, feedback in the 'Did you think it was visually pleasing' question was positive. There were a few nitpickers here - calling out inconsistent lighting and poor choice of colour on the post-it notes, but the movement appears to be the star of the show here.

What sort of audience would you say this animation was aimed at?

A lot of people hit the nail on the head with the audience question, correctly guessing the YA/Adolescent age-range I was aiming for when I made the ESting. But this being said there were also a lot of people who thought otherwise - some claiming it was more for adults, some claiming it was more for children.

Do you think it was an original idea?

Mixed responses on whether my ESting was original or not. Half of them thought it was a really original idea, but the other half had seen this sort of thing before.

Is there anything you think could be done to help improve this animation?

Suddenly, when asked what could be improved, everyone's an expert. 'Make sure to leave the camera on a tripod and not move it at all', 'expand on colour palette', 'improve lighting' etc. There were a few people that didn't understand the point of an ESting as a good 10 or so people suggested I make it longer. A couple of people suggested I change the music, and I would be inclined to agree as all of E4's included soundbeds were pretty awful, but again that's part of the brief and part of this work is sticking to the brief whether you like it or not.

Here's all of the responses collected into a PDF:



I also received feedback from my peers in a lesson. They said that while the animation was very smooth and flowing, I could have benefited from some more consistent lighting and a colour of post-it that was both closer to E4's purple, and that stood out more against the background.

This course has been an interesting journey for me work-wise so far. I came in at the start of the first year wide-eyed and excited to try new things, but I didn't quite realise that since the very beginning I had been harboring some form of superiority complex in regards to my work on the course. Every time we started a new project I was ready to just go for it and make the best final product that the course had seen up to that point. Ambitious is slightly underselling it.

This had so far worked out for me because I was still able to get the work done on time, but something like what happened with my ESting was bound to happen eventually. I had a bit of a hard time coming to terms with the fact that I wasn't as whizz-bang at everything production-related as I thought I was, and it did result in a bit of a knock to my confidence towards work in general, but I feel like this was something that had to happen at some point.

So, what I've learnt from this experience is that I need to be more aware of both the time constraints that I have on the project and my own ability to deliver a quality result within that time frame. Going forward with Single Camera Productions it might be a good idea to keep that in mind.

This being said, if I take that on board and build upon it for future projects I feel as though I would be a good candidate for this sort of work in the future.

Emotional baggage aside, there were still other constraints on my work, such as E4's own guidelines on what constitutes an official ESting:



Since E4 are the ones judging this competition it was important that I followed all the rules and kept inside the guidelines.

I've mentioned time as a constraint, but there was also the fact that some resources weren't to hand that I would have liked to have; such as post-its that were closer in colour to E4's ubiquitous purple than the more pastelly pink I had. I probably would have benefited from some more lights as well.

Despite the fact that making this ESting has been a very stressful process at times, I still love animation as a medium and I would love to be involved with an animated film to some capacity at some point in the future.