I’m currently 3,000 words into my thesis. After delving into my introduction and analysis of statistics collected in previous studies, I’m faced with the decision of how to go about conducting my actual surveys regarding the work I’m doing for my FMP. This morning I finally settled on my research methodology.
As you know, the goal of this study and work, besides adding to my showreel, is to determine whether audiences, particularly in relation to their age demographic, respond more positively to different animation styles- realistic or more cartoonish, and for this reason I’m animating two different versions of the same lip sync performance / style of shot that feature different artistic styles.
Now the key to conducting my research correctly is making sure that I have responses from different age demographics. My original, unformed idea was to just conduct an instagram survey, but the problem with this is that A) all of the correspondents are my own age and B) know me as a person.
So here’s an outline for my research methodology.
Younger Age Demographic (Children):
For this group, my interview will involve less analytical questions. I’ll simply ask them which animation they like better and why. As far as finding participants for the survey, at my internship we often bring in children to give feedback on the video game we’re creating; I can pull these visitors aside to ask them questions with the permission of their parents and my boss. I can at least collect data from one or two children under the age of ten and one or two teenagers this way.
EDIT: it has occurred to me that because I am leaving my job in the middle of October and returning to the US, I will not have time to finish all of the animation that I plan to have for my research (3 separate shots) and have all of this available to use in my studies conducted at work. It would skew my data if I only show the children one of the shots (Dana/Carla) as opposed to all three, and show the other groups all three. Therefore I may have to rely on in-person interviews with younger children that I know as family members of friends. This may significantly decrease the pool of participants in this survey group.
Adult Audience (Gen Z and Young Millennials)
This group will be split into two parts: animators/artists and non-animators. For the group of animators, I can survey and interview my coworkers and classmates. The downside to this is that all of the above know who I am, and may be tempted to be kinder or skew their answers towards what they think I want to hear, although personally, I know them well enough to believe they will most likely be brutally honest anyway. Another resource for animators is Reddit, where I can ask on r/animation. Now, this may hurt my feelings a little bit, as people on Reddit tend to be a little bit mean, but it’s a good resource. And besides, if they want to roast my work I can report that result and mention that perhaps it is this or that technical issue that skewed data. So, for the animator group, that’s how I’ll collect data from people who know me and people who don’t. The group of people who don’t know me will encapsulate a wider age range, although will most likely still be young people, as Reddit users are often between 18 and 30 years old.
For the non-animators, I can still use an Instagram poll to collect responses from my friends. This does face the same problem of them knowing me, but with Instagram’s polling feature it is more likely that a wide swathe of people will respond, as it takes mere seconds to report an answer. I can also easily collect an answer in regards to why they prefer their selected animation in the questions box that Instagram features. Obviously I must still collect answers from people who don’t know me, and so for this reason I will ask several friends to feature my work on their stories and report back to me the results that they got. It will be interesting to see whether they are vastly different from my own, which could indicate whether people who know me will answer less honestly out of emotional obligation. It’s funny how I’m afraid of people on Reddit being too mean and hurting my feelings while people on Instagram may be too nice and skew my results, lol.
Not everyone will be willing to participate in the interview segment, some may only answer the poll. But if they are willing to respond, the questions may involve: Which animation do you like better? Why? What kind of media do you think you’d see this in (TV, movie, video game?) Which do you think is more professional? Which one is more interesting?
note: I may choose not to interview my classmates as they share too much knowledge of the background to my work and our studies to give accurate results.
If I can I will ask friends with roots internationally to share this, and compare results from my friends in the UK vs US vs South America vs Australia.
Friends who may be a good choice (thinking out loud) Catrin Harrison, of Ross, England: 1500 followers. Cole Irwin, of Chicago, USA: 1000 followers. Vanessa Vilchez of Lima, Peru: 450 followers.
The Late 50s+ Crowd (Baby Boomers)
For a moment I was baffled as to how I’ll collect data from this audience. Adults born before 1964 don’t tend to broadly use niche spaces of the internet or check social media often. But then it hit me: I will ask my grandparents, who are in their late 70s, to share the animations on Facebook without stating that it is the work of their grandchild and report back to me the results. It is also likely that I’ll be visiting my grandparents in Tennessee towards the end of October and into early November, and in that time I can ask older adults in person what their response is and conduct interviews.
For seniors, my plan, like with the younger children, is to ask less analytical questions. I’ll simply ask them which one they like better and why, although I will also ask whether they enjoy watching animated movies and whether they are less likely to watch them than a live-action movie- and why.
Participants to Conduct: Betty Jane and Charles Campbell of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Will collect information regarding followers and participants when I get to it.