Audience Research

This is the first post in a series of back log post dates as I've been looking for houses recently and have silly-ly neglected to update the old blog. Theres a bit to go through, ticking boxes and all that.

So, I overcame the problem of which direction to take the character, now on the working title of 'Ron' cause it's one that my 'focus groups' have assigned him. I did this really by talking over the problem with the inhabitants of forums on sites who's audiences might watch the 'older-teen-to-adult' cartoons I'm talking about. The sites I'm talking about are collectedcurios.com, newgrounds.com, deviantart.com in the cartoon section and friends and colleagues who have this viewing taste. I still need to post up on conceptart.org to gain more opinions but I'm doing pretty well so far.
The range of the sites, although not specifically chosen for this purpose is good because it grants me a range of sub audiences within my broad audience bracket. For example, collectedcurios is host to a fairly small community who discuss the works of the character artist, Jolly Jack and so have this one artist in common for aesthetic taste. Newgrounds was undoubtedly the most difficult to gather constructive points from because it's users are primarily young teenagers and as such, alot of users tend to have little patience for others but, in a way this is great because it's like being able to just dip my hand into pure intended audience and see how it feels. Deviantart was the most understanding of the sites and my guess for this would be because this is a community that is specifically used to dealing out and receiving criticisms with art work.

To cut a long, long, LONG story short over the forum posts and discussions with peers, I had basically asked which direction my audience felt that I should take for the character. It was agreed by collectedcurios almost unanimously, by my peers and by alot of newgrounds and deviantart that a character with a discernable personality who they can see in different strange situations each episode, as opposed to a completely random character.