Understanding the requirements of working to a brief

There are many ways in which you can respond to a brief. This can be through a contractual brief, negotiated brief, formal brief, informal brief, commissioned briefs and tender briefs. A contractual brief is a written document which is included within an employment contract, when you are in the stage of being offered a job. It will say what your employers expect of you, and how much you will receive if you successfully complete your duties. This can work both ways, with the client pitching potential shows towards TV corporations, for example Louis Theroux usually thinks of ideas for his next documentaries and asks the BBC for permission for it to be broadcast on their channel. This is also a commissioning process.
A negotiated brief is when the potential employee works with the corporation to highlight the objectives which should be included in a brief. This therefore makes it easier for both parties to agree on and sign the contract. When a new show is thought of, a negotiated brief may occur. This would be between the new shows producer and the channel. They would negotiate what can and can't be included in the programme.
A formal brief consists of both the client and the employee having a meeting in which they will tell you verbally, and face-to-face what they require you to do. For example, this can usually happen when a producer has a new idea for an advert, a host of people will sit around a table a discuss what will make it suitable. This has happened in the case of Levi jeans. Whereas in contrary, an informal brief would simply be the client phoning you and discussing the aims and objectives, or through emailing.
A commissioned brief is when a client will quickly request and employ a worker to fulfil specific objectives. It is the step before a contractual brief.

A tender brief is sent out via post or email by a specific company. This gives potential employees the chance to put forward their ideas before sending it back to whom sent it. They will then rival other people and companies who have expressed their ideas. E4 send out these kind of briefs, and it was the same brief they sent out to myself and my fellow pupils for our Estings.
There are also competitions which you can enter in order to get your ideas broadcasted. These briefs will be sent out to applicants and they will then produce their own production, after it is complete, every competitor will send their shorts to the specific corporation which sent out the briefs. They will then decide who has the best one, before they win whatever was on offer. Virgin media have these kind of competitions, here is an example of one of their latest winners in 2012.

When producing our own Estings, we were given a tender brief highlighting what was demanded of us to make a successful production. It give us implicit rules such as the length of our Estings having to be 10 seconds long, and that when it was finished we had to post them on our blogs and send E4 the blog address. However, before we did all this, E4 recommended that we look at previous Estings which had successfully been

put onto the website and there TV channel. They encouraged us to do this as it would help to give us ideas for our own productions. E4 were also clear that our Estings had to be finished and submitted by the 9th November 2012, otherwise any sent in after the deadline would not be accepted.

When producing my Esting, I constantly consulted with my tutor. As I was thinking of how to set out my animation, she would give her advice and feedback on how it could perhaps be improved and how it could be made more fluent. She told me to add things like a big top to my set, and to add more colour to it as my esting was centered around a clown and the circus. Once I had moved onto the editing stage, I consulted her on how to include soundtracks and how to make the lighting more consistent, after this I worked relatively independently throughout the rest of the production.
When I read the brief it was clear it wasn't particularly strict, the deadline gave me enough time to plan and produce my Esting to the standard I wanted, however I did recognise the consequences if I hadn't met it. However it was strict in other areas, such as how long the animation had to be and the amount of Estings we could send in and the soundtrack.

My Esting did have constraints though, as said before in another post on my blog there were legal, ethical and regulatory constraints. In channel 4's editorial guidelines it states "those externally who are engaged by C4 are responsible for the editorial decisions they are making. Crucially this includes making sure that all content they are responsible for has been subject to the appropriate level of editorial compliance". This can include harmful and offensive material such as violence, the use of drugs and discrimination against religion. Infringement of copyright laws is also included, so using someone elses soundtrack, or ideas for characters are examples of infringement. Ofcoms BCAP code impacts channel 4's guidelines by enforcing these rules against the programmes and video shorts they broadcast.
When we had finished our Estings we then had to gather feedback on what we had produced. We used methods such as questionnaires, blog posts, youtube videos and taking part in a class focus group to achieve this. From this I found out what was good and what could be improved about my Esting, with many people praising the fluidity of my video but constructively criticising the use of the E4 logo. The continuity of the two clowns I used also had to be improved. I acted on this by re-creating my smaller clown so it looked virtually identical to the main clown in my animation. I also chose to hand create an E4 logo out of plasticine and placed against the cannon. I put this in the sequence of shots just before my clown was shot out of the cannon. After these amendments had been made I felt the Esting looked better, so the feedback and consultations were extremely helpful.

We didn't have to make any changes to our final budget because we didn't directly use it. The college supplied us with plasticine for our characters and we made our set designs out of cardboard boxes and materials used from the props room. In my case I used a stripy t-shirt out of the prop cupboard for the big top in my set. We also didn't have to make any adjustments to the time used because we finished before the deadline we had been set.

This project has helped me to understand animation much further and develop my media skills which I can now take forward into future media jobs. I learnt how frame rates affect how smooth an animation will come across and how stop motion animation is used in popular TV programmes and movies like Wallace and Gromit. It has enhanced my own skillset as I have learnt how to make successful motion picture through taking still frame pictures, and and it has also widened my knowledge in the editing stage. This therefore would help me in future as it shows I have a range of skills in both making normal videos and stop motion animation videos. At certain points I had to multi-skill, and I mainly did this when shooting my Esting, I had to both move camera angles as well as moving my characters, trying to achieve seamless footage. I feel I contributed a different theme to Estings. Out of all the Estings I have seen I have never came across one using clowns with circus environment. So I feel my Esting was completely unique.