'Fruit at the Gym' Animatic

Dan Hodgson

Below is an animatic for the idea of 'Fruit in the Gym' mentioned in previous posts. The purpose of this is to provide a general idea of: how long the piece would be; the way in which the the idea flows as a whole; readability of primary concepts such as the health benefits of Dream Green smoothies; how effectively the piece engages with the intended clientele - primarily gym goers.

   

The animatic was produced in a fairly basic cartoon style with minimal attention to backgrounds and props in order to allow an objective decision to be made as to whether or not key elements (narrative, timing, scene layout etc.) work together in such a way that key information can be conveyed while still engaging with the audience. As discussed previously, the completed animation could be produced in a range of styles including stop-motion and CGI. My major concern with this idea is that its playful and light-heated style may appeal mainly to teenagers and younger viewers, in contrast to Dream Green's intended age range of 25-40. However a great deal of very popular advertising campaigns have used a similarly unusual and zany concept to reach a more mature audience:

The advert above is also an excellent example of how animation can be composited over live-action in such a context - we discussed a similar technique whereby the fruit would be animated separately before being composited over a live-action gym instructor. Another potential area of weakness attached to this idea is the time-span of the piece. Adverts for television generally don't run over 40 seconds due to the cost of air time and that maintaining audience attention for any longer becomes difficult. As such the idea should either be compressed to a shorter time-span, or taken forward as a piece for online advertising through sites such as YouTube or Vimeo.

In all, I feel the idea has a lot of potential - it's concise, informal, conveys key information in an engaging manner and loosely targets the intended audience in a way which is not as potentially exclusive as explicitly focusing on one demographic. Though the weaknesses of time-span and age appeal of this idea seem fairly inconsequential, when it comes to the final decision of which idea to take forward, these factors could lead to one idea being chosen over the other.