Understanding the requirements of working to a brief

There are lots of different ways briefs can be presented, one is contractual. Contractual is when the brief is outlined in an employment contract, an example of this is when Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat pitched their idea about revamping Sherlock Holmes to the BBC and they had meetings and talked about it and wrote up a contract to sign to show what they had agreed on.

Negotiated is when you need to work collaboratively with someone to create a brief and discuss and agree things together. Formal is when a client explains what they want and their requirements to you in a meeting where as an informal brief would be when the client discusses these over the phone or email. A commission is when a person is requested and they sign a contract. Tender is when companies are sent briefs via post or email and you are asked to respond with your ideas and put up against ideas from other companies and people. Also you can enter competitions which give you briefs about what the client wants from you. There also Cooperative briefs where different companies work together.

The E4 brief said the Esting needed to be 10 seconds long and it also had the deadline of Friday the 9th of November 2012, these were important because they didn't want them to take up too much time when they were on tv between shows and also if they were too short they would be less noticeable. There was a deadline of Friday the 9th of November because they needed a set time for all of them to be in so they could choose which ones to use for the TV. 

For consulting the client/ my tutor, I made a blog post with my Esting idea ( http://ralvarezbtec.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/planning-estign.html ) and had my tutor check it to make sure it was ok. The brief was strict on the amount of time the Esting had to be and when it had to be in but apart from that we were allowed to do anything with it within reason as long as it was appropriate fort the channel and brief. The constraints of making the E Sting were that I couldn't use whatever music I wanted because of copyright but E4 did provide clips of music to use for E stings on their website. I didn't find any problems with my E Sting that was affected by ethics or regulatory bodies because my idea was appropriate for anyone to view during day time TV. I received feedback via questionnaires, reviews on youtube and from a focus group we held in class, the things I needed to improve on were to shorten it a bit because it went over the time allotted in the brief and also make the superheros arm move when he threw the purple blobs at the villain. So I went back and re-shot some things and this is my improved ESting:

I didn't have to make amendments to the budget as the college had paid for the equipment, plasticine, pipe cleaners etc, already. Also I didn't need to change the time scale I did it in as I met the deadline and I also didn't have to make any amendment to fees as I didn't have any but if this was being done on a larger scale in the industry not for a competition to do yourself I may have had them.

Doing this task there were lots of opportunities for self-development, I learned alot about animation and how claymation is done and I found it really enjoyable to create the characters, sets and think of ideas to do for my Esting. I may use this in the future for my music video, or segments of it, at the end of the year. The new skills I learned was how to make the modles and how to shoot claymation and put it into a video to make it work, I had to multi-skill at times to keep the characters where I wanted them and try keep my hand out of shot whilst I took the next frame for the animation. I feel I contributed to the brief because I had my own idea of what I wanted to do that kept to the target audience for E4 and no one else in class did the same thing, I kept to the 10 seconds in my improved version and I got my video done in time for the deadline.