The requirements of working to a brief

What is a brief/project brief? 

A brief is a concise statement that outlines the objective of the task that you need to carry out. In terms of media, a brief is often handed over by the client and will include what they want to see in the product and how they want it to be made. Briefs can very in rules and regulations, some give a very broad outline and enable the creator to have full creative freedom and some have strict rules that need to be followed and they only want it to be completed one way.

What is a commission and what does it mean to be commissioned?

A commission is when a individual or company approaches someone to make what they want as they may have seen some previous work and been impressed with what they have seen. This means that there isn't an open invitation to apply, they have just handpicked someone. A tender is when an open invite is put out for people to apply and then the company will commission someone out of that group that have applied. An example of a commissioned show is 24 Hours In A&E which is shown by Channel 4. On 16th June 2014 Channel 4 commissioned 30 episodes of the programme from The Garden Productions. Before this phase of commissioning the programme had already won many awards and had had 70 episodes aired previously to this.

As I mentioned earlier in this paragraph a commission and a tender are two different things - a good example of a Tender Brief is what the website IdeasTap used to advertise and promote. IdeasTap was an organisation that funded creative projects and over their 7 year existence gave out £2.3 million to their members who won the different tender briefs that they created.  As well as this they provided support and valuable networking experience to allow their members to reach people they wouldn't have been able to before. 

Above you can see some of the businesses that IdeasTap have worked with and the tender briefs that would have been given out would have surrounded what these companies wanted. Another great example of Tender Briefs and a method that is allowing thousands of online creators to earn revenue is from a website called FameBit. The way FameBit works is from brands placing tender briefs on the website and then online influencers placing a pitch which outlines how they will reply to this brief. If the company likes the idea they will then pay the influencer to promote their brand, there are hundreds of companies placing Tender Briefs on FameBit and allows online influencers to easily approach big brands without having to know the big wigs in business. 

Both Tender briefs and commissions get the job done, just in different ways and they suit different needs. As you can see from the examples above it is much easier to create a Tender brief if you don't want to think of the creative side yourself but commissions are much better if you know exactly what you want and know the people you want to make it. 

What other kind of briefs exist? 

The best example is the brief we responded to in class. The E4 e-sting brief is a competition and is open to everyone (some guidelines apply) and people can then enter the competition whilst still responding to the brief. The brief that we had included a lot of rules and regulations but allowed us to have a lot of creative freedom.

Discuss recognising the nature of and demand implicit in a brief, e.g., what was specified in the E4 ESting guidance that you had to include/meet?

As discussed in the previous answer there were a lot of rules and regulations that we needed to adhere to as E4 have a lot of rules that they also need to adhere to. For example, there were certain music tracks we had to use, a time limit, formats to export in and the amount of entries you can have. Despite this we had full creative control within the rules and regulations which meant any ideas that we had were allowed to be filmed. Our class created a whole variety of different animations and there are hundreds of different animations on their website too, this is different to some briefs that control the way you make the product and what the creative idea needs to be.

In the media industry, what degree of discretion do/would you have in interpreting a brief?

Usually a brief is final and the creator has little negotiation as to how else it should be made. Despite this it is possible when commissioned to tinker with the brief if it makes it look better or work better. Of course, permission will be needed from the employer before any changes are made. A good example this is a project I was recently commissioned to make - the client asked me to create one 6 minute video for their online platforms but I suggested to break the content down into 6 videos and make it a series. The content they wanted was still created but in a different way, hence the brief was changes slightly. However, some briefs are not allowed to be changed and creative freedom is limited.


What constraints (legal, ethical, regulatory) might you face when responding to a brief? What constraints did you face? 

There were a few legal issues that needed to be looked at when we were responding to the brief. First of all the music that we used needed to be copyright free and be a track that was viewed as ok by E4, as well as that there may be issues like whether the narrative was suitable for public viewing. In our narrative we had a bomb diffusion and it was made straight after the Paris Attacks so we thought about changing the idea that we had planned. We knew that it was a sensitive subject but we decided to go ahead with the idea as it wasn't promoting terrorism and it had comedic value all based around E4, that was a thought that went through our heads though. We also had to make sure that our e-sting was appropriate for our audience and didn't contain any obscene content to make sure we had no regulatory issues. We had a look at the British Board of Film Classification to have a look at the kind of things we could and couldn't include. We included no swearing, no sexual content and no violence, with that taken into consideration we had no regulatory problems but once again it was a conscious effort to make sure it was all ok. There were also some financial constraints that we had to deal with. We were on a very limited budget of about £10 - this meant that we needed to source equipment that we already had and also find cheap props or ones that we once again, already owned. We knew that we needed to be careful with what we planned as we didn't want to plan something too bold as it could have gone way over budget and then we would have faced problems. Our animation was going to have to be different to high end productions like them from Aardman Productions etc. Thankfully though we always had in the back of our mind our small budget and planned it so we would not have too spend any money at all, this is a constraint that a lot of small filmmakers have to deal with.

When it came to copyright all we really needed to be careful about was the music that we used. E4 had a bank of their own music which entrants could use and this was all copyright free, the only problem was this music wasn't too our taste but it had to be used as we couldn't use any other due to E4 regulations and even if we could purchasing the right to use a certain track wouldn't have met the budget we were on. Despite the music not necessarily fitting in with what we made at least we didn't break copyright laws and our budget wasn't broken.

There were also some trademark laws that we needed to abide to in order to make our E-Sting which surrounded the use of the E4 logo.

Channel 4 state 'The E4 logo is a registered trademark belonging to Channel 4 and Channel 4 owns all intellectual property rights (including but not in limitation trademark rights and copyright) in the E4 logo. The E4 logo is protected by intellectual property laws in the UK and throughout the world and we reserve all rights in the E4 logo.

This means that we were allowed to use the E4 logo for our E-Stings but it would be illegal to then make profit from it as it is owned by E4. This was another constraint that we had to be careful of.

Ethical consideration was also an important consideration that we needed to be aware of when making our E-sting, I have already talked about having our narrative loosely linked with terrorism and the Paris Attacks that was a sensitive subject near the time of making this - we also needed to think about how race, gender and sexuality though. We needed to make sure that we were not discriminating against anyone and we made sure that we did not. There was absolutely no need to discriminate against anyone and we were very fair in the way we represented our characters so this would not be a problem.

 Did we have to make any amendments to the proposed final product? 

Not really no but there was an evolution of the product through the process of it's creation. One of the biggest problems we had was sticking to the time limit. Once we had decided on our narrative we captured all of the images we had about three times to many and this would mean that the E4 rules would be broken as we had a 10 second time limit. This meant that we had to cut a considerable amount of the images out which meant the narrative was slightly different. We also had some discussions with our teacher regarding making changes to our story line originally as it was too much like the Paris Attacks, our teacher said that this needed to change in order to go ahead with making the product. As well as this we had discussions regarding how we would chop the edit down to the correct time. This was the only amendment that we made as everything else went to plan.

For what reasons might there be amendments to ; a budget? Your fees? Conditions outlined in the contract? 

Normally there are changes made due to the employer wanting different things from what they originally planned. As well as this prices could raise or things might not go to plan in terms of how the production was originally planned. With this E4 e sting there wasn't a budget and we were not being paid so there wasn't anything to be changed but conditions in the contract could have changed. We were not legally binded into the contract so we did not have to produce anything as this was a competition but there may have been parts in the rules and regulations that could have changed which would have affected us, this was the closest to a contract.

I have had budgets and fees changed when making videos for clients after a fee had originally been agreed before. Sometimes though circumstances change which means the price has to be adjusted. For example in the past, clients have wanted extra work done that hadn't originally been agreed which means taking more of my time and hence the price went up. As well as that some companies have wanted extra graphics added in after the first draft had been sent meaning it was going to cost them extra.

There can be unknown costs that come into play as well in independent films. For example the independent film Papadoupolos and sons originally had a budget of £15,000 for make-up and hair but ended up spending £16,782 on it, this is a great example of how prices can spiral.

 Papadoupolos and sons is an example of a small budget independent film but big budget films have the potential to go miles over the budget if not monitored closely and if the movie plan is not followed. Green Lanterns visual effect budget was raised by £9 million two months before the release of the film.

Why might someone respond to a brief? 

Briefs are a great way to build experience in the industry and by responding to them you are also building your portfolio and making contacts with new people, networking is invaluable in this industry. As well as this if your response to the brief is successful then you could have a big opportunity. 

Above is a brief from IdeasTap who are no longer running but helped over 200,000 people while they were running. They used to give prizes for winning entries and also provided a fantastic level of support for those who worked with them. 

Identify opportunities I had for self-development

Throughout this unit I had many opportunities for self development as I learnt many new things that before this unit, I didn't know how to do. I have never really had the chance to animate before and have never really researched into animation either.  By shooting stop motion animation on a frame by frame basis it made me think a lot more about what I had in the frame and how to construct an animation. Once we had all of the pictures I learnt an awful lot in post-production as well, I have explained more about this in my animation evaluation but to conclude this project gave me the freedom to develop as a creator. 

Did I have to multi-skill in this project?  

Doing two things at once was prevalent throughout this project as we had a lot to do, with only two people. This meant that we were made to multi-skill at times as with many of our other projects. For example in the production process I was made to capture the images, organise the lighting and direct the set. Then in post production I was responsible for organising all of the images we captured and editing in Premiere Pro. 

What contributions did I make to the project brief? 

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. We achieved this in our animation hence we met the brief. In terms of the production of the E-Sting I had a part to play in the all areas of production and me and Ellis split the workload evenly.