Requirements of Working to a Brief

Briefs

A brief is a guideline that is used to create a project. The project is usually done for someone or a company. A brief is given to you when you are commissioned. A commission is a call for a specific individual person or company. This is when you are selected to do a job for a client by making a project to their specifications. This can vary from any media product like a radio ad or a television episode. However usually large companies send out tender offers which are calls for everyone to take part in the job. The media industry is very competitive which makes these tender offers harder to get noticed by the company. The way you respond to these offers can be by a competition that you can enter. The prize of the competition can vary from prize money to even getting employed by a company.

Reading the Brief

When you get a brief you have to pay strict attention to the conditions in which you must abide by for your work to be eligible. The brief is essentially what the client wants you to do and if you don't meet the brief he won't accept your work let alone pay for it. For my E sting production I was given a brief on the E sting website for me to follow. I had to meet the brief to allow my E sting to be aired on the ident. This included that I needed to put in an E4 logo included somewhere within my E sting. There were also restrictions to the music that we could include into the E sting. We weren't allowed to include any commercially sound music tracks in the E sting. For people within the media industry it is important for them to read any brief carefully because it could get them out of work if they don't. 

Negotiating a Brief

With briefs they can be negotiated with however it can depend on the company providing the brief. Sometimes the company can be very specific to what they want you to do for the project. However you can negotiate this by using the things the brief doesn't mention. For example with my E sting I had a western style genre to the E sting. I also added some of the iconic symbols of the westerns by adding tumbleweed and a saloon. As the Brief didn't mention any specifics on what they wanted the genre to be it is essentially negotiating by choosing one yourself. 

When replying to a brief you need to be careful of how you respond to it. If you don't respond correctly your work won't be accepted by a client or anyone. Also the brief gives you the information you need when making the product so it is important for people to read the brief to not waste any time which is important in a animators line of work. When responding to a Brief you may have some restraints and rules you must abide by to get your work to the company or client. It is important for companies to make sure what they show is suitable and morally sound. E.g. if a company runs a channel and the brief asks you to make a children's advert it is important that you read this carefully to avoid any misunderstandings. In my E sting the brief made sure to mention that it shouldn't contain anything to sexually explicit or grim. This was one of the restraints that I had to pay attention to. 

Another constraint that I have mentioned is the copyrights to music. If a client was to show people a product that had music without the copyrights to it the client could be taken to court and damages may be awarded to the suer. This is also included with films which itunes broke. In 2011 itunes sold russian movies to people without the copyright holders permission. The copyright holders could have taken itunes to court and sued for damages.With my project I had this constraint as I was specifically told not to use any commercial music. One of my amendments I had to make to the final product was the fact that my product wasn't meeting the 10 second mark. In the brief it was clear that it had to be 10 seconds or it wouldn't be accepted.

To resolve this I added some more shots to meet the brief. In the media industry many projects change and get cancelled. When this happens companies can sometimes make changes to budgets and need to include things in your project that you didn't need to before. This may happen due to the company's funding or the company's re-evaluation of itself. For example if a company wanted to change its logo, they may ask you to change it in your product during production.

Opportunities

The reasons someone might respond to a media brief is for the want of experience. Experience in the media industry is a vital thing to have as some company's and clients won't give you work if you don't have the experience to meet the quality of work they want.

If you were a employer for a highly respected company you wouldn't want to use work that is amateurish. You would want a professional to give you a product of quality. Another reason someone would want to respond to a brief is for the financial gain. In this industry work can be hard to come by as there is a lot of competition that you have to compete with to make a decent living. Furthermore when replying to a brief to deal with this competition you need to build up a reputation of this work by getting your skills known. Having your work out their can make you seem more reliable to other company's and clients. 

The opportunities for my project that I have had were procuring a little experience in stop motion Claymation. Before this project I haven't done any sort of work in animation. I feel I have got a good understanding of how it works and how I can improve on it if I were to work on an animation project again. Also I feel I have obtained a greater attention to detail for detail in my projects. With stop motion animation I feel that if you make a mistake with the process it can really break the immersion of a animation. During my first time making a stop motion project I noticed that I had made a mistake of breaking continuity. 

The new skills that I have got is the mostly due to the editing side of the industry. I feel confident in most areas however I still feel I need improvement in my editing skills. In this project I feel like I learned even more about the editing program Adobe Premiere Pro. When I was struggling to reduce the speed of the shots I found out how by exploring the program.

The contributions that I made to the project brief were that I made a stop motion Claymation ident for E4. It was primarily based around western showdowns in popular iconic films of that genre. It was 10 seconds as the brief requested and included one of the soundtracks provided by E4.  I also included a clay version of the E4 logo to make sure it met all requirements of the brief.