(RESIT JANUARY 2012) Research of animation prospect.

To help create a successful film you must imitate existing films conventions to insure a high potential audience views your work. Baring this concept in mind I have gathered further facts of comedy from IMDb (internet movie database) and have analysed my findings to insure a successful film.

Top-US-Grossing Comedies

Film	Gross
Shrek 2	$436M
Toy Story 3	$415M
Finding Nemo	$340M
Forrest Gump	$330M
Shrek the Third	£321M
Up	$293M

Out of the six top grossing comedy films, five are animated. I presume this is because these films attract all ages having a gigantic potential market. Considering this I question if my group could make an animated opening? We have little understanding of animation and do not have the resources to follow the pursuit to industry standards.

Aiming to compete with industry standards will push us to improve our work, making the animated thought irrelevant. Yet, I researched free programmes to see if the possibility of creating an animated comedy existed.

This video was created with the free animation software ‘Synfig’, which is available to PC’s.  Inspired by the work I downloaded the programme for myself to experiment with its tools and to access if it had the potential to create a comedy opening of industry standards.

However, due to the process of developing this type of art I had to abort my plans of creating a miniature piece for two reasons. Firstly, it was extremely difficult and secondly it was time consuming. This highlighted that creating an animated opening to industry standards is impossible with the resources available.

Example of an animated comedy from the list.

I think there are three factors which make animation films the top comedies. Number one was briefly spoke about in the above clip. The characters are fun, and a fun character is a likeable character which is ideal for an easy going humours film. Animation films can make characters perfectly but due to real life films actors have to create these likeable characters to the best of their ability which is normally short of perfect. None the less, by planning our characters as if we could create them perfectly with help of actors we can also make a near to perfect comedy ideal character.

Secondly, animation films can make films which are out of this world, literally. This can be shown in movies such as Toystory, Shrek, Finding Nemos and Monsters Inc. This ability to bring jokes to life in other worlds can make them cheesy but more humorous. For example the quote ‘Tell a person who cares.’ can be transformed to ‘Tell a fish who cares.’ for a film such as Finding Nemo; though it is incredibly lame in a cinematic atmosphere that would be humorous. This perk of making things funny which really aren’t can be extremely beneficial to cheap laughs.

Thirdly, the plot of animation films appears less serious making them easier to find funny. By having character suffer who aren’t real makes it seem okay to laugh about their misfortunes. This allows for an atmosphere where no boundaries hold animation films at bay.