Requirements of Responding to a Brief

There are many different ways a project can be created and distributed to a company, Briefs, commissions and Tenders are good examples.  A brief is an outline of project created by the client, providing guidelines for the creators to follow, a commission is when a client approaches a specific company or person with their brief and a

Tender refers to the process in which clients accepts bids or offers for a project.

There are also instances where the person doesn't interact with the company unless their pitch is accepted. Competitions, for example, where a company sets a brief to the public and accepts all entered responses, choosing one winner (or many)  and providing prizes. The E4 was a competition, where the winner won money and had their video displayed on the website and channel. 

In the E4 brief, we had guidelines that had to be met. The music had to be one of the tracks provided on the website, it had to be no longer than 10 seconds and it had to be a quality that could be broadcast on television. 

The brief was to create a E-Sting with these guidelines and, because we were working on another unit, it needed to be a Stop Motion animation. There wasn't any specification on what it needed to be about though, so there  was a large amount of freedom with the ideas people came up with and  what kind of animation was used. In the media industry, the degree of discretion would depend entirely on the people involved, some companies may be very relaxed and some may have specific structures.


When working to a brief there can often be changes made to the contract, even during the process of working on the project. There can be changes to budget, fees or conditions. This may be due to timing, if a project is taking more or less time than expected. Or if the company realises more work needs to be done than they initially expected. It may also be due to directors changing midway. Marvel's Antman had this, where it was initially directed by Edgar Wright who dropped out in the middle of the process when he felt that his work wouldn't fit in with the overarching plot between the franchise. This will have ended up with lots of changes made to the brief and film to fit the new directors.

The brief for this project was given by our tutor and the guidelines were on the website, this meant that we could check with them or on there if we needed more information.  As the only specifications were to have a 10 second stop motion video for the e sting. The plot, style and idea were all entirely open. 
 One thing we had to pay attention to was legal constraints such as Copyright, making sure that our idea didn't go against this or copy any ideas. Ethical constraints ensured that nobody would make anything that could be seen as rude or offensive. Regulatory means we had to follow the OFCOM rules. As we had followed the rules, there was no need for changes to be made to the work.

We created our first version of it and showed this to our tutor, who gave feedback of what we could alter. Such as creating the border from fabric. Then when we had a full finished version it was uploaded onto Youtube and feedback was obtained from the class. 

Sometimes changes need to be made to a film so that it fits the age rating that the brief specified. An example of this is The Hunger Games, The company was aiming for a 12A film in the original brief but was told that, due to the large focus on violence in the film, the lowest rating it could receive was a 15. So after cutting a few shots and darkening scenes to make injuries and violence less prominent, which added up to around 20 seconds of cut footage, they achieved a 12A. 

Someone may respond to a brief to earn money, showcase their work and build a portfolio that will then give them opportunities to get bigger projects
There were many times in this project where I had to learn new skills because the task was so different to other work I'd done. I hadn't worked with stop motion, so this was a new skill that I needed to learn. It required a lot more time to do shots but everything had to be kept consistent so it was better to film everything quickly. So I had to work out how to find a balance of quality shots and a good use of time. 

 I also hadn't worked with the Green screen, so creating the border was something entirely new. This also meant I had to learn how to use new tools on the editing software, such as how to remove backgrounds and improving colours. 

 Because our work was only completed  by two people, we both had multiple roles to fulfill. I ended up working on aspects of pre production, filming and editing. This included creating the storyboards, moving the stop motion objects and changing the colours of the video to make it more vibrant.