Blog #19- In Which Professional Examples are Critiqued

1. The most successful element of this work sample is the smoothness involved in the animation of this video. Naturally, stop motion is very hard to work with, especially when there are so many images involved in the making of the video. It is hard to believe in a video this smooth that it was not just filmed and everything was moving on its own.

2. The basic message of the work is "Our product is awesome and you should buy it because we have cool games based on movies", even though everyone knows that games made off of movies are not very good at all. I know this because it is an XBox commercial and that's what just about any commercial for any given game system entails, because in any commercial for a game system you have to have games being played on it that makes you say that these games are better than what the other system offers so I should play it instead.

3. The intended audience is, as with any game system or game commercial, people who love to play video games or are looking for a game system to play. The aimed demographic is probably teenagers and younger kids, because of the games advertised (Spider Man, Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek), and what demographic those movies were aimed at. People that age would recognize those movies and say "Hey, I liked those movies, I should get that system so I can play those games!"

4. The commercial mostly consists of animation of the figures from each game moving around, in green clay whereas the guy doing the 'animation' is wearing white. Green and white are XBox's main colors, and the animated figures are showing what games the XBox has to offer people who decide to buy it. At the end, of course, it states the message loud and clear, though, for those of us who have an IQ equivalent to that of a fifth grader (no I'm kidding).

5. The clean animation of stop motion indicates hours and hours of photography work (when you look at the making of the video, it mentions that it took about 3 and a half years). Because so many photographs were taken, it makes it look like everything really is moving cleanly and smoothly. The only problem is that occasionally the guy in the background moves a bit to the left or right, which kind of throws everything off in the video if you're looking hard enough.

6. I picked this piece because I have intentions to make some sort of animated stop motion video in photoshop, and I'm looking around for examples that portray smooth animation so I can get an idea of what exactly I want to do in the video, and how I can pull it all together, even if I don't end up using spoken words in the video.