Research and Planning: E4 and the Brief

E4 is the channel that began back in 2001, originally showing reruns of shows from other channels and airing American programmes.
It now runs it's own British TV shows such as The Inbetweeners and Hollyoaks, while also still airing American sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory and Friends. The primary Target audience is older teenagers, there are shows that you appeal to more than one gender, but the majority of shows seem to be male targeted. The secondary audience would be Teenager girls, older men and women. The audience are likely to be main streamers. This can be seen in the style of the shows which do the best in viewing figures, which are usually comedies.

A graph showing the most popular episodes

In terms of regionality, the main viewers will be British, as this is where the channel and a majority of it's shows are created, and in terms of class in would probably be lower middle class/ Skilled working class. 

It is a companion to Channel 4, and is owned by the same company. It was made as a entertainment based alternative that was originally a paid added channel but eventually moved to being a part of various TV subscriptions such as Sky. Channel 4 also owns More 4 and Film four.

E4 uses 'E-Stings' in between their programming, these are short ten seconds videos that show the logo in a funny or clever way. They hold competitions to give people a chance to send in new ones. My brief is to create one of these using stop motion animation.

Entries on the website

There are several E Stings that have been created that I find interesting or funny, for a variety of reasons.

This one is titled 'Flavour of Life' by Veronique Lacloche on YouTube , I like this because of the well known content in it, using a 'Great British Bake off' style short, a show that people are familiar with. I also like the use of hand drawn animation as it makes it sweet and nice to watch. The genre for this is comedy, shown with the colorful drawings and funny content with the 'flavour'. I think this target audience would be young adults as it would need to be people who recognise the show but still appreciate the childish art style.


The second one I liked was 'Hero' by Elliot Ames. I like this one because of the soundtrack and simple use of shapes to create the characters. The theme of this would be action, as it shows the typical ideas of superheroes. The target audience would be teenagers as it has reference to comic characters such as Batman or Superman.




This is an unnamed E Sting created by Will All. I chose this one due to the unusual style, using animated paper cut outs. This one would have a target audience of older adults, as they would appreciate the technique more.




To respond to his brief of creating an E Sting, I first researched old fashioned animation and created samples.









For the next part of the research we worked with Lego, I created a small dragon and filmed it breathing fire by adding more blocks in each scene. Lego is a good tool to use as it looks clean and is easy to use. It is also easy to keep models upright due to the nature of the product, while materials such as puppets may be difficult to animate. The downsides to it is copyright, as Lego is a large company, and a lack of movement in the models. This means that some of the shots look bulky or strange. This could be good to work with for my final piece but, due to the copyright on the product, I'd need to find a different version.