Survey - Why Did It Go Wrong?

Below is the survey that I created to refine my project and otherwise hone in on a more specific topic. I namely wished to discover which would be the preferred Crusade from students but saw this as an opportunity to better know my demographic and what they expect from my video. However, some areas of the results aren't as useful as I had hoped. In this survey I asked 25 students.

Notably it seems half of the people I asked were History students whereas the other half were not. This appears fine at first, given that I wished to offer a better understanding of History to those who don't study it - making it more accessible to the average person in order to engage an interest in the subject - however it soon became apparent that the information given was not as useful as I'd hoped.

Whilst the overall consensus was an interest in the Third Crusade, I believe that this might also be down to the non-History students simply choosing it randomly or based on media influence, the Third Crusade being a prominent fixture in Western Media. Through films such as the Kingdom of Heaven taking place prior to the Third Crusade along with Robin Hood having reference to the Third Crusade due to the absence of King Richard the Lionheart, his brother John taking over while he was away on Crusade, it is likely the nuanced reference played some role in influencing people's opinion.

Additionally, the question allowing for the students to write a comment on what they would like to see are rather simple: some saying "facts" or "history" and others simply adding "knights and fighting". Clearly the question is either too vague or allows the students too much freedom, alternatively they may not have answered seriously as some added film quotes within the text box.


The Results:

I have left out the results from the fifth question as they were widely useless or perhaps too simple. The results of the final question are also not included as they're relatively irrelevant, I was unable to find anyone younger than 17 as I conducted the survey during a free period, therefore 23 are students and only 2 are above 20 years old - these being a couple of teachers I extended the survey to.

The Third Crusade appears to have been the most popular an interestingly everyone claimed that visuals help with learning - which bodes well for my visual orientated video. Additionally, many claim that the use of images such as photographs (either of armour or places or paintings I presume) along with stick men are the best visuals. There also seems to be quite a split between the most important aspect of the history video, therefore I am likely going to include narrative, facts and factors - presenting the historical information as to meet each criteria. Furthermore, the technical aspect of my video will seemingly include a narration, something which will perhaps require a voice actor as to best narrate the video and the information.

Lastly, the length of the video seems to range from 5 minutes and above; it is unlikely that a video shorter will offer as much depth to the subject and anything too long will be disengaging perhaps. Therefore it is likely that the video will aim to keep around near 10 minutes or so as that seems to be a popular time, this coincides well with how long the videos of certain YouTubers are.

How I Know Animation

I know the basic rules like stretch and squash, frame-by-frame and that there are a multitude of ways to animate. These methods consist of: stop motion, digital drawing, 3-D or SFM, hand drawn, claymation, machinima and so on and so forth.
In terms of my own method of animating, which I will likely use within this project, Adobe Flash is pretty good. It's great because I can use tweens for movement to save time or create a back-log of symbols (mainly for mouths) in order to quickly add them in separate frames without redrawing. However, the use of tweens is not strictly my forte and I typically animate frame-by-frame; animating in this way makes it look better - in my opinion - however it also provides some freedom with the movements of the animation. Tweens rely on having certain pivot points which might otherwise reduce the natural flow of the character on screen.

I took an interest when I was younger watching YouTube animations and naturally being interested in anime and other western cartoons. After focusing on an animation project for the Higher Project at GCSE, I had started to read more about animation and how to do it. Writer Maureen Faucette gave me an excellent overview of the different types of animations and the overall history of the craft, although the more practical skills were learned by watching Oney, Harry Partridge and SpazKid who all had HowTo's on YouTube.

Below is SpazKid's Tutorial videos:

I even had to use animation in my Media for my opening credits and music project. At the end of the day I know how hard it is to animate and the time constraints so I would like to reiterate the focus on an animatic style in order to save time.

My Project - Initial Improvements

After talking with my supervisor, some concerns have been raised which I aim to tackle and explain in order to bring more focus into my project.

• Firstly, there would be difficulties in portraying a specific historical figure such as Richard III. I've found especially in studying such a figure that it is impossible to conclusively decide on his character and accurately portray him and information regarding his past without some degree of bias, there are too many inconsistencies within his history - mainly due to incredibly bias sources - which might be a task in itself to analyse (let alone make a video). He'd be a great and relevant historical figure to analyse, especially given that his remains were discovered quite recently, however the sources are too difficult/bias to portray the 'Maligned King' accurately within the time I'm likely able to dedicate to a single video.
  It might be easier to create a video on the more factual and narrative Crusades, with this in mind I still need to know whether I will be looking into the First, Second or Third Crusades; a survey from my chosen demographic may help offer insight into this and decide which Crusade has the most interest behind it.

• Naturally, following the need to decide on which topic to focus on, I must choose a clear demographic. I will need to produce a survey which tackles the question of which Crusade along with the age of the person doing the survey, in order to clearly see which demographic I will need to adhere to. I presume that the demographic will be students based on the fact that I am a student myself, therefore having the ability to easily ask fellow students for feedback; I could perhaps showcase my final animation to a younger History class in order to gauge the duality of whether or not it is engaging to both a more experienced student to a newer one.

•  My supervisor advised that while I have said I know how to animate, it might help to go into further detail on my skills. With this in mind, I should mainly look into seeing how effective/informative the video is for the audience by taking on criticism. This is something I completely agree with and intended to do from the start by producing proto-videos in a sense, granted they wont be as high in quality as my final video.

• If this blog's site is down then I might lose all of my work, as such I should screenshot my work and place it in a Word document. This way I have some clear evidence of my work which doesn't rely on the site being up.

• I should also create a timeline for the project which finishes in around March; this is something I will likely do on a term-by-term basis.

My Project

Hello and welcome to my Extended Project blog!

Here I will be recording the development of my project digitally and in a chronological way. First, I would like to introduce the fundamental premise behind my project; through my higher level of study into History, I've taken a particular interest in a variety of subjects - particularly Richard III and the Crusades - and wish to combine my newly honed Media skills to produce an educational video. History is crucial to a better understanding of the world and our past as a species, if there is a way to better revise the material and perhaps gain interest into the subject from the youth - much in the way Horrible Histories did - then it would be interesting to explore that.

The educational video will likely inform the target audience (likely to be other students as they are studying the topics I wish to use) of either the Crusades or Richard III. To appropriately format and clearly project the information in the video, I will likely need to analyse other educational videos and assess what they do well; I've seen a few and they typically include animations or other key visuals to illustrate the information and will therefore include them myself.
As such I will be using YouTube as a strong basis for my research into the formatting of the video however the overrall knowledge will either be my own or from various libraries - I've managed to gain access to the Durham University Library and may use it to research into my chosen topic further.

I believe it is worth noting from the start that I have done the Higher Project and it was on animation, aiming to improve my ability and research into animation generally. Due to this, along with my home interest in illustration, I have a decent understanding of animations and wont be going into much detail about my abilities or the 'How to...' - simply offerring insight into the process and how I aim to use it. My main focus will be the aforementioned structure of the video and its overrall quality and presentation, perhaps even working on character designs for the visuals to show the development of these concepts.