Requirements of Working to a Brief

In regards to work within the media industries, a 'brief' is a set of instructions or guidelines that one must work to in order to complete a job; set by the client. For instance, for our Esting animations, the brief was set by E4.

Briefs can come in a couple of flavours, the first of which is called 'commissioning'. This is where the client will reach out to a certain individual and ask them to complete a job for them, outlining the brief and paying the commissioned individual when the brief is met. For example, a startup company might commission a web designer to make a website for them.

An example of someone who has been commissioned to make something would be when Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon were commissioned by Adult Swim to make another series of Rick and Morty after the first one was such a success.

A tender, on the other hand, is somewhat different to a commission in the sense that the employer or client will reach out with an open brief, allowing anyone to respond with their own ideas and interpretations of the brief.

Another way someone can respond to a brief is if the brief is issued by competition, such as that of the Estings competition that our animations would supposedly be eligible for.

Above is the rules listed on the EStings website for the competition. This is the brief that we had to explicitly follow for our animations.,

Since there wasn't too many rules, I felt like I had quite the amount of freedom from a creative point of view, however given the 10-second rule and the fact that we HAD to use one of their 10-second soundbeds meant that there was quite a few restrictions too.

As far as actually negotiating the brief was concerned there wasn't a lot of room at all. E4 were pretty steadfast in some of their requirements ('If it's not 10 seconds long IT WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED BY THE JUDGES'). But that's not so bad because there wasn't a huge amount of rules and regulations so creatively we had a lot of freedom.

There are all kinds of restrictions and constraints that people could theoretically face when responding to a brief, even besides the brief itself. One of those things is copyright. Sometimes with tender-style briefs like this people will unwittingly use copyrighted material like images, music or sound in their submissions and this is absolutely out of the question most of the time. If someone were to submit a piece that uses copyrighted material without the correct permissions, and then E4 was to then broadcast that on their channel then they would be breaking the law, and would be liable to be sued by the original copyright holder. Sometimes some organisations have ways of accepting copyrighted content (such as going through sample clearance and paying royalties themselves) but if this is the case then they will specify in the brief so it's always best to get material you have permissions for.

Another thing in the way is regulatory problems. Aside from E4's own guidelines in the competition rules, this animation is supposed to be broadcast on national TV, so there is OFCOM's regulations to satisfy as well, namely their rules on explicit content and the watershed.

Here's an excerpt from OFCOM's guidelines on explicit content. In a broadcasting context these would have to be taken into account as well as the more specific brief that you are fulfilling.

I had to make a few amendments to my project as it was underway - I mentioned in my evaluation that time was a huge issue with my animation, and it would have taken even longer had I not elected to cut out about 30 or 40 frames from the cube segment; if you watch the preanimation and the finished result side by side you'll see that the cube is on screen for a good second or 2 longer than it is in the final video. I managed to keep it at 10 seconds because even though there wasn't as much footage as there would have been I was shooting for double the framerate to everyone else, so the 'smoothness' of the animation didn't really take a noticeable hit when I dragged it out to 10 seconds.

Things might be changed for a few reasons during production. For one, your budget might change during production (most probably for the worse as your client needs to save money), so you might have to sacrifice some part of your work that cost too much. That, or the terms of your payment (if applicable) might come into question and you might not be able to work on it as long as you would have done before.

Briefs, especially tenders, are great for people starting out in the industry as it's a great chance to get their name known and get experience. If it's commission-based, someone would probably respond to this brief because they have been reached out to, and it's a job.

A good example of a tender-style brief would be those offered by IdeasTap - open briefs offered to anyone who can apply for them.

IdeasTap is unfortunately closing down on the 8th of July 2015 (a few weeks from time of writing) - but they have one last brief up on their website:



I had many opportunities for self-development during this project; probably more than a lot of other projects I've been a part of on this course. I go into more detail about this in my evaluation for the Animation unit. 

I did a lot of new things I hadn't done before in responding to this, such as making a pre-visualisation animation, and working from that frame-by-frame. I also hadn't really had the freedom to shoot stop-motion in manual on a DSLR before, so that was something I picked up as I went through the project.

There were a few different skills involved with this project. A big one for me was having to judge where the post-its had to go without the help of a grid, and assembling pictures on Premiere in stop-motion format. As well as that I used skills that I am already pretty familiar with, including using After Effects for the preanimation. A skill that I used that a lot of people would probably agree that I need to work on is time management.

 The contribution I made to the project brief was my finished animation; a 10-second long 'ESting' for use on Channel 4's channel E4. E4's brief only specified that I had to make it ten seconds long, and I had to use their audio and had to include their logo somewhere. However, the college specified their own brief on top of E4's brief, and that included the fact that the Esting had to be in the form of a stop-motion animation, and that it had to involve either lego, clay, or other found objects (like post-it notes).