The Requirements of Working to a Brief

What is a brief?:

A brief is a task or a set of tasks given to someone by another person, company, competition etc.

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

Being commissioned is when you are directly contacted by a potential client and given a specific brief which has been personally give to you, large and small companies commission people.

The writers of Sherlock (Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss) came to the BBC with an idea and pitched it and the BBC really liked the idea, but they wanted 6, 60 minute episodes but the writers wanted 3, 90 minute episodes, this really caused a lot of problems, the full story is below from Wikipedia.

What is meant by the term tender?:

Tenders are sort of like being commissioned but instead of it just being a private brief given to you by a client, it is an open brief which can be taken on by anyone as long as they follow the brief, tenders are really good to help lead onto a creative job in the media industry.

Below is an example of a real tender from the Ideastap website, the description is below:

If you successfully win this competition you could win:

How else could you respond to a brief?:

Another way to respond to a brief is through competitions such as the E4 Esting one that I took part in, these tend to win you money or prizes for being within the top 3 or a runner up and are a great way to get some work recognized although they may not lead onto a career as well. 

Another example of a competition is the 'Young Filmmaker Competition'. Below is the rules regulations and description:

Reading a brief:

Negotiating a brief:

From a creative point of view it was very flexible with its rules as the content could be anything you wanted but some of the fixed rules in the brief such as the duration of the overall clip, for example it states 'if it's not 10 seconds long IT WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED BY THE JUDGES', so overall it could literally be anything you want as long as its fairly tame enough to be on television during the day and its 10 seconds.

Problems I had to deal with such as regulatory ones 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.

Below is a screenshot from the Ofcom website. 

I had to make a few tweaks to my project as it was underway, I had to add a lot more frames to my animation as I thought I would need less but in fact I needed a lot more to make the finished product a lot smoother

You must always take into consideration that things may need to be changed around, for example your budget might change during production, so you might have to make dramatic changes to some parts of your work that cost too much.

Briefs, especially tenders, are a good thing for people who are starting out in the industry as it's a great chance to get their name known and get experience.  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 such as working frame-by-frame. I also hadn't really had the chance to make an animation, let alone shoot it manually on a DSLR before, so that was something I had to learn quickly and pick up on as I went alone.

 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.