COP 3 - practical - research

For my practical response I will put together a set of character designs that will be for an animated sitcom, similar to classic like The Simpsons, Family guy and other popular, modern animated tv shows. However, my characters will live in the UK and be representations of what a uk based family is. My reason for doing this is because from my initial research, I found that there is a lack of successful UK based animated sitcoms.

here I put together a quick moodboard with images of popular animated sitcoms for me to take inspiration from. my main animations that I will be taking inspiration from are shows like The simpsons and Family guy as they are similar is content and are also two of the most successful animated sitcoms to date.

I also decided to do some factual research that revolved around the idea of a UK family. I looked at statistics to help me gain an understanding as to what uk families view as vital family time.

• In 2016 there were 18.9 million families in the UK.
• There were 12.7 million married or civil partner couple families in the UK in 2016. This was the most common type of family.
• Cohabiting couple families were the fastest growing family type between 1996 and 2016, more than doubling from 1.5 million families to 3.3 million families.
• In 2016, around 25% of young adults aged 20 to 34 were living with their parents, increasing from 21% in 1996.
• In 2016, around 7.7 million people lived alone in the UK, the majority were women.
• “In 2016, married or civil partner couple families remained the most common type of family in the UK although cohabiting couple families were the fastest growing family type over the last 20 years. The growth in cohabiting couple families may be due to couples choosing cohabitation as an alternative or precursor to marriage”.
• Pamela Cobb, Population Statistics Division, Office for National Statistics
• A family is a married, civil partnered or cohabiting couple with or without children, or a lone parent, with at least one child, who live at the same address. Children may be dependent or non-dependent.
• A household is one person living alone, or a group of people (not necessarily related) living at the same address who share cooking facilities and share a living room, sitting room or dining area. A household can consist of more than one family, or no families in the case of a group of unrelated people.
• Dependent children are those aged under 16 living with at least one parent, or aged 16 to 18 in full-time education, excluding all children who have a spouse, partner or child living in the household.
• The families and households estimates are based on social survey data from the April to June  quarter of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) household dataset.

• *Married couple families include both opposite sex and same sex married couples. Cohabiting couple families include both opposite sex and same sex cohabiting couples
• Families without dependent children have only non-dependent children or no children in the household
• Lone parent families grew by 18.6%, a statistically significant increase; married couple families grew very little (0.3%), not a statistically significant increase, over the 2 decades.
• Of the 2.9 million lone parent families in the UK in 2016, the majority (86%) were headed by a female lone parent, the remaining 14% were headed by a male lone parent. These percentages have changed little over the 20 years since 1996. This could be associated with women being more likely to take the main caring responsibilities for any children when a relationship breaks down and therefore becoming lone parents.
• In 2016, of all lone parents with dependent children, 55% had only 1 child, higher than both other family types shown in Figure 3. Further, only 13% of lone parents had 3 or more children. Conversely, married couples with dependent children had more children on average than other family types and only 39% had only 1 dependent child. These patterns are likely to reflect the stability of parental partnerships, as well as the fact that people often marry after having a child and then have further children within marriage; this is demonstrated in the registration status at birth statistics.
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• “Mealtimes reflect UK Family life”
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• "We stick together," she says. "We're a unit of individuals."
• "We always eat breakfast together," she says. "It tends to be the only time we're always together." 

From this research, I understand that UK families typically favour meal times as a fundamental and key time for their families to socialise, much like in the US, sitting in front of a tv as a family is commonly seen as "family time", (much like the couch gags in the simpsons).

This research helped me come up with a concept for my animated sitcom, where it will be based around a dining table. Because of how high the divorce rate is in the UK, this has given me the idea to focus on one character who will switch half way in the episode to go visit the other family. the two seperate families will be distinctly different. The set up of the episodes will be based around the dining table which will allow for a lot of dialogue and will focus mainly on the characters dynamic and how they communicate and "function".