Branding Research and Development

Introduction

Brand awareness relates to how many people are aware of what your brand is, for example, lots of people are very aware of what a “Disney” is where as not as many people would know what an “Intelevision” is. In short, the more people that are aware of your brand, the more money you’re going to potentially make.

Brand awareness has a strong relation to your target audience because a part of customers being aware of brands is the customer perception of that brand. coming back to the Disney example, those guys are perceived as being very child friendly when it comes to the movies they make, where as a brand like Universal would be perceived as making films that aren’t as child friendly. (at least some of the time anyway) Sometimes two or more demographics can see the same brand very differently, for example, the Sonic The Hedgehog brand has got quite a few continuities under it’s belt, those being The Games (which according to forces there are two), The TV Shows (all 5 of them), The Old Anime Film, The Comics series (all 5 of them thus far) and now a live action movie, and on top of that, some of them have gone through multiple opposing tones and in the case of Lost World it does multiple tones at once. This means that some people will perceive Sonic as a more serious series while others might see the character as more of a light-heated cartoon series. (and that’s not mentioning the argument about what colour his eyes should) Another example is how some people perceive EA games as a money grubbing, studio killing dumpster fire, while others (mainly those not as in the loop on this stuff) would perceive them as just another game company like any other.

mostly child friendly

more general movies

the bane of all evil

be honest, how many people have you seen complain about the green eyes. (also this render seems to invoke Sonic CD vibes for Classic Sonic fans given the similar pose)

as you can see, it’s pretty much the same pose

Graphic designers tend to do most of the work (in terms of visuals anyway) when it comes to raising brand awareness for companies such as Disney or even McDonalds because graphic designers usually design the logos in the first place (as you’ll no doubt have seen/will see in past and future visual examples), the graphic designers have to think about what they’re clients want out of the logo as well as how they’d want the audience to perceive the brand as a result.

There are many ways that one can market their product as you are about to see below these include posters, billboards and banners, mascot costumes, websites, social media pages and even company uniforms, just to name a few.

this poster for example, although I disagree with the character’s design here due to certain eye grabbing inaccuracies (although it is better that what would have been) would mainly be seen in places such as cinemas for a certain amount of time in order to entice people to want to come and see the film, which itself is meant to promote the games it’s based on.

This Super Mario Maker 2 Billboard in Hong Kong likewise is meant to be viewed outdoors by people just driving by (or walking by depending on where the billboard is placed) so that they’ll become aware of the game and consider purchasing the game. (if they have a Nintendo Switch that is)

in Japan in particular, one way that Game Freak, The Pokemon Company and Nintendo market the Pokemon series from time to time is by having an army of people dressed in Pikachu Costumes (with the odd Eevee and mimikyu here and there) waltzing around in a parade dedicated to the Pokemon series, this is used to spread awareness of this hit phenomenon so that more players go “yeah, that parade was pretty good, maybe I should try out this Pokemon thing.” which means they’re more likely to get the games and often, by extension, a Nintendo Console to play them on.

sometimes a product will be advertised on a bus (which is a clever way of doing things because buses tend to be a form of public transport), the 1998 Godzilla movie (despite it’s problems as a Godzilla movie) is a rather clever example of this, in-sighting the reader’s curiosity to what this version of the character would look like.

Press kit are used by the people in the press to help market an upcoming movie, show or game, these are interesting because when you find one in person it can act as a behind the scenes of the sort of guidelines the press would have to follow in order to effectively make the public aware of a product that’s coming soon (although they now exist in a digital form)

Semiotics

the term Semiotics is used when referring to icons and logos for brands such as Mcdonalds, we also use Semiotics when referring to things such as road signs and characters (whether they be fictional or not)

it’s funny how even a single letter can have two different meanings depending on the context in which it’s used in. for example, This M is recognized by many as the golden arches with it’s distinct yellow hue (much like their fries incidentally enough) and the way the M is much rounder except for the bottom…

…Where as this M, despite being the same letter, is viewed by many as the symbol of that one plumber Mario from that one really popular game series I like, here you’ll notice that the M has more shape edges, giving it a more jagged look, this M is red and in this picture, it’s encased inside a white circle. but even without the white circle, folks could still tell the difference between the Mcdonald’s M and Mario’s M just by the way they look via the colour choices and general font shape

this stop sign is also red (much like Mario’s M) but in the context you’d normally see it, which is when you’re driving on the road, the red is used to communicate danger because of how red is associated with aggression. along with that it’s the only sign (to my knowledge) that is shaped like an octagon which to me, is perfect because of the octagons edges, which if you were drawing, you’d have to stop when you reach an edge so that you can re-orientate the pencil and accurately draw the rest of the 8 awesome angles

as you can see, semiotics are useful for many different situations and even brand awareness, which is important if you were, let’s say an animation studio trying to get off the ground with your first movie, before you even begin thinking about making your movie you have to decide on what you want your logo to be. as such you’d have to make a lot of important decisions about things such as the colour pallet, the font and in this case, what your mascot looks like, luckily for me, I happen to have made these key decisions when making the logo for Slamination Studios

although currently, Slamination Studios is just an Idea with not much backing it up, like most other things I’ve come up with over the years…

…such as a cartoon sheep that runs around beating up a cow for a living…

…or a mechanic who can use his spanner shaped hair to stop Micro-Transactions…

…or even a space captain and his crew who have to clean up rubbish in outer space (except that one actually has a quick short to back it up)

now, you could look at characters such as Super Sheep and Guyzo (as well as everyone else on this blog’s front page) as examples of semiotics because I use them all over the place all willy nilly, which in turn means you see these guys more and more and that in turn will make them stick inside your head more easily (so in a way, I’m getting these characters into your heads now before I’ve even properly written the first Super Sheep Movie), We also created some semiotics of our own to see if people could recognize what they depicted (stuff such as elephant sanctuaries and the like), take a look

as you can see here, even with my rough sketch, people were able to recognize what they depict, this tells me that I’ve got the skills needed to create various signs and that all I’d need to do to make them better is to clean them up

We also drew up some semiotics while watching a gameplay video of Super Mario Bros for the NES

in the video we watched, Mario took the warp zones

here are my results in this task

classic video gaming

How to Social Media market correctly

now the example we’re going to use here is for the Walt Disney company’s social media profiles but a lot of other movie studios do this too, what I’m talking about here is the way a company will typically change their header to relate to a new product of service that they want to push at the moment

the current example here being that of Disney plus, which I’m going to call their Notflix (which emulates what Netflix does without being Netflix, hence the term, Notflix)

Sometimes disney will of course change their banner from time to time to promote a big release or two, but they take a slightly different approach that would make this approach on top of that, you’ll see what it is after I show what I mean in these Wayback Machine archives (which you can visit yourselves by the way)

the image on the wayback machine showcases one of Disney’s older profile pictures from before they chose to simply make it the Disney logo (also the banner is promoting Cars 3 because that would still be in theatres at the time)

and here, the banner is in fact, that of Mickey Mouse’s 90th Anniversary (but Oswald Was the the true original you bungle dungs)

More examples of them changing the banner over time can be found on the Disney studios account

now technically this is a different account entirely but it better showcases the change the banner technique than the main one did (at least as far as I could find) and is at least somewhat related, now here they’re promoting the general line up to be released in theatres, they’ll end up abandoning this style in favour of promoting one major release at a time in later screen shots

You can see slight differences in profile and ACCOUNT NAME (I suppose since some Youtubers change their names over time I shouldn’t be surprised),
but the main thing is that they changed the banner to be Finding Dory Themed to promote the then upcoming release

and here they’re promoting the then new beauty and the beast remake (spit) with this banner

and now they’re promoting the Christopher Robin Movie (not to be confused with 20th Century Fox’s Goodbye Christopher Robin, which now they also own), you get the general Idea, for every major movie they’ll change the banner, It’ll have happened with The Incredibles 2, Tommorowland, Wreck it Ralph and all the rest of em (also Twitter changed their shape from squares to circles)

now what do they do to supplement the Bruce banners? well they’ll flat out make specialised accounts, just to promote a movie franchise, that way the main account can focus more on promoting Disney as a brand and less on promoting just the movies (besides that’s what their also fairly general Walt Disney Studios account is for)

heck, they take the banner concept 1 step further and flat out have accounts that solely exist to promote existing and sometimes upcoming movies

now, the main change to these banners is usually changing the words “In Theatres (Blank)ht (blank) 20XX” to “On DVD and Blu-Ray (sometime after the film’s theatrical run)

another thing they’ll sometimes do is cross promote with other properties that they own, as seen in this playful conversation between a parent and their subsidiary

now this is a subtle example of cross promotion where one Disney owned account talks to another Disney owned account about Disney Plus and Pixar’s finding Dory to tell the audience that Finding Dory’s eventually coming to that Notflix very soon

this not only creates a playful tone, but it also tries to make the audience chuckle with it’s seeming inability to find Dory (which might just convince a fan of the character to want to try out this service)

probably because Dory waltzed her way onto Amazon

and funnily enough (almost as if it was intentional), Finding Dory will eventually end up on Disney Plus

What Do I want to make for this project?

One Idea I have for this project it to create a massive billboard that features my main characters (I.E: Super Sheep, Guyzo, Captain Cartridge Ext) but they’re all silhouettes (which means it’d be time to make two versions of this) so that when they eventually get revealed people end up going “whooaaaaaaaa!”

so while typing that first paragraph I had the zany Idea to do a video poster instead though that one is a maybe because with my inexperienced nature that may take a while (doubly so if I make it animated), essentially, the video poster would consist of the same concept as the original Idea except they’re actually moving.

As a direct result of the problems I’ve come across with the animation idea I came up with the Idea of a halfway point between the two previous Ideas. (where the characters are static images but they all get revealed one at a time)

Me and The Boys getting featured on a billboard:

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Right, Come on, It’s Billboard Time Boys

Now, billboards are a wonderful piece of advertising kit. Why? because of how versatile they are when it comes to the ways and places you can use them in, from the typical roadside to the side of or even inside a building. Heck the Digital technology used in tv billboards allow you to have multiple ads cycle through on one billboard

here’s your average old billboard (seriously what is this show?)

and here’s a new fangled digi-billboard (as they shall be called from now on)

Companies use Billboard all the time to market their products, whether they be a film, game or even burger joint because they’re not specific to any given industry unlike a TV advert or even social media marketing, as seen during the first two example billboards above this paragraph (although the second one is advertising the Ad Space on this billboard so who knows if it even counts here)

it is Sonic Time my dudes

This Billboard advertises Sonic 4 Episode 2 (not really the best one in the series but hey, it’s better than episode 1), here they show Sonic and Tails (who were both present in Sonic 2) flying over the background of the first level in the game (and thus showing off one of the game’s tag moves), the game’s logo is meant to invoke the classic Sonic style that was present in the 90s (even though the characters use their modern designs which to me, seems to clash with the 90’s nostalgia they’re going for in this two episode saga)

something like this…

…not like this

you can also see the SEGA logo in the bottom right corner to let people know who actually made the game, even though DIMPS are the ones that developed the game, SEGA are just the publishers and Sonic’s rights holders.

oh look, the Sonic Rush People

and then there was that time the Grinch told people to quit moving to LA in order to advertise that animated Grinch movie by Illumination

Ok so this is a really weird billboard campaign for a film, they’re billboards for the Grinch 2018 movie 2 years ago (with it’s November 9th release date and the studios logos situated on the bottom) but they take on this weird, almost condescending tone towards the audience, as if the Grinch himself was making these inane billboards, I think it is clever in a sort of, unexpected way as the grand majority of other marketing campaigns like this don’t typically sneer at the people viewing the page (whoever came up with this campaign deserves a raise for sure)

and this isn’t even the only one of these, there’s plenty more out there

These billboards also relate to the audience as some of them describe situations that they’d typically find themselves in (this one talks about what sometimes happens when the traffic lights turn green, but he’s saying he loves it because he’s the Grinch)

One problem with taking on this mean tone in the marketing is that it is easy for someone who’s talented enough to create a very convincing fake as you are about to see in the image below (although the fact that people are talking about this would make more people aware of this Grinch Movie)

now, obviously this one’s fake (I think) but it’s really convincing to a casual passer by isn’t it? The main thing that make’s me think this is fake is because it mentions Banjo and Kazooie from Banjo-Kazooie and Geno from Super Mario RPG by name, which I don’t think the actual people making the movie had the licences for (also it seems to reference that fake leak that happened before Smash Ultimate’s release)

So yeah… that was an interesting recent campaign now let’s move on to something older and more conventional (and not as easily faked)

uuuuuummm… Ok then? I guess we’re walking on the weird side just a little bit longer

dag nabbit I said more Conventional, not less, oh alright let’s do this. So this is a campaign that Hot Wheels started back in 2010 where they took the scaling of the real world and essentially went “yeah, that’s cool. but what if we’re Hot Wheels”

So I just had the Idea of sticking the characters in live action settings (alla Roger Rabbit) suggested to me by this unit’s leader, I’m honestly surprised I didn’t think of this first because I think it might work as an add on to the reveal of the Characters as it will also allow me to express these characters’ personallies and not to mention it will also give me an opportunity to include other related characters, like these guys:

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oh, and you’ll also see the Characters from the fantasy unit get used here too (think of them as being like DLC being added on to the main game), and if you’re wondering who this DLC pack contains, it encompasses these guys:

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(although they might not necessarily look the same when the time comes to making these billboards)

Why frame Roger Rabbit?

now that I’ve cleared all that up, let’s discuss the effects of who framed roger rabbit for a bit. (this may sound unrelated at first but trust me, it’ll all come back to my Campaign)

that’s right. It’s Roger’s time to shine

don’t look at me like that Supes you’re time is coming my son

anyway, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the story of a bitter detective name Eddie Valiant, who’s help is begrudgingly enlisted by Roger Rabbit because he got framed for murder, and so they have to find out Who Framed Roger Rabbit. (ha, he said it, he said it)

What makes this film stand out amongst it’s contemporaries at the time (that being 1988) was it’s impressive blending of live action footage and hand drawn animation in the same environment, and I’m not just talking about the characters either, but the way they interact with things

yes, finger prints

Also they got all these people to be in it:

it’s a who’s who up in here (oh bee tee dubs, this isn’t even all of them)

Now you’re probably asking two questions, 1. How’d they do this amazing blend?, and 2. How’d they get Looney Tunes in the same film as Mickey Mouse? well I’ll answer the second question first because it can be summed up in 2 words: Copyright Negotiations. (which stipulate that Bugs and Mickey for example must have the exact same amount of screen time) Now that that’s out of the way, it’s time to answer question 1.

To achieve their amazing blend or real and animation, the crew had to maticulously plan every shot down to the last detail (I.E: Camera Movements, Prop Placements, Prop Movement, What the cartoons’ll be interacting with, the lighting Ext), then they go film the whole thing with some on set stand ins for some of the characters (I.E: Roger and a Weasel)

ya know, these guys

after that the stand ins get out of the way as they re-do the scenes without them, and depending on the scene you’d find yourself working with spitting robots, Plate smashing Robots, guns (and other objects sometimes) on strings and even windows engineered to break in a certain shape

and look there is no pain, no pain, no pain, no pain, no p-

we’ll be happy, you got that? HAPPY, CAPTIAL H-A-P-P-Y

Hey Hey, Cut it out
Does anybody understand what this duck is saying?
and by the way, look at those stools go

like, zoinks scoob, look at that puppeteer go

after all the filming for the film is done, then it’s time to bring in the animators (which includes the late Richard Williams, rest in piece man) to go ahead and draw the characters on Cels that go over the live action photography (because Animation works in frames, the live action pieces have to be converted into pictures)

you may notice that the characters don’t have shading

after that’s done they hand the cels over to ILM, AKA Industrial Lights and Magic (the George Lucas company), so that they can add in elements such as shadows, highlights and the works and then the whole thing is sent back to the animators for approval and after a round of Voice acting and some editing, hey presto, you have one of the few brilliant live action animation hybrids out there, the others in my opinion being Looney Tunes: Back in action, maybe Space Jam and definitely the Detective Pikachu movie (We’ll see what happens with that new Sonic The Hedgehog movie)

Heck, the animators of this film even coined the term “bumping the lamp” to describe when something really goes above and beyond. (as this film did) “Bumping the lamp” references that scene in the film where Roger and Eddie are in the dark room with the swaying light, this is because they had to work really hard to keep the characters consistent in that environment (and it was a nightmare for the ILM team to do the shadows and highlights for)

there it is

and that’s not mentioning those rare instances where they actually needed to have Eddie be an animated character (those animated Eddie only last a few frames each so that you don’t notice it)

see what I mean?

and there is even one point in the movie where Eddie has to go to Toontown, for this part, the roles end up being reversed as it’s no longer the cartoons that need to look like they occupy the real world, it’s the real human that needs to look like they occupy the cartoon world

aaaah yes, smile darn ya, smile

now this part of the movie was achieved with a combination of clever camera trickery, a couple of real props and a little good old fashioned blue screen as seen in the comparison video below

now the two objects in the blue screen version of the skydiving scene were used as reference for Bob Hoskins to look at before they removed them in favour of adding Mickey and Bugs into the scene

you may notice that some parts of the blue screen version change into the storyboard (and in one case even a pencil test) for the film, another thing you might have noticed is that the parts that become the storyboard also correlate to the parts that don’t feature Eddie at all, this is because for those pieces, they just needed to animate those parts without the need for blue screen (because again, no Eddie needed)

Now how does all this relate to my ad campaign?

for my Ad Campaign (which I’m thinking of calling reality slammers) after the character reveal poster I plan on doing stills of characters created by me in real life situations (although it’s probably not going to be as good as Roger Rabbit), which I actually did do a little bit of before coming to college officially, wanna see em? well here ya go

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  Where is that pesky man that makes

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  Ruuuun, it’s article 13!

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  is the man that makes here? no? well fiddle sticks

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  SHAAAAAACHS!

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  Lorange and the city streets

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  I blew up the world Supes, I’m Nuclear Hex

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  In a minute Supes I’m Tired

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  Why do we keep getting lawsuits? Why’d they kill Lorange?

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  Getting meta there are we?

Now, obviously I can’t just submit these and have that be that, because they were made before college (and some of them use images from the net) so I’m gonna have to get that thinking cap on fast and start thinking already