Understanding the Requirements of Working to a Brief

Understanding the Requirements of Working to a Brief

A brief, or a project brief is a set of guidelines given for a person to work by. A production company looking looking to create a project from a fresh idea may commission a writer/producer/artist etc. to do the work for them, however the will pitch them a brief or project brief to inform them of how they want it done. Commission is a sum of money paid to an employee upon completion of a task. Some times it will be a flat amount, and some times it will be payed on a percentage of sales/success.

A specific type of brief called a tender brief, is where where a client will advertise their brief and a production company will bring together a proposal that they will pitch to the client, there could be multiple pitches to the client from many different companies, so the client will then get the chance to choose the proposal that they think best suits their brief and offer the job to that production company.

Another type of brief is a creative brief. A creative brief is a document created through meetings, readings, interviews and discussions between a client a designer before work begins. This will generally be applied in lines of work such as fashion designers, logo designers, architects etc.
You also have contractual briefs. Contractual briefs are legal documents that outline the duties required by a company/employer. Contractual briefs are legally obligatory and must follow what ever is outlined.

A brief will be given on a media project in order to outline certain parameters for everyone to work towards/with. For example it may detail things like limited equipment/material and will usually include the initial planned budget. They are very important to be followed because going over budgets can kills productions stone cold dead. In the production of Jaws (1975) the film spent over twice its projected budget to film on the Atlantic Ocean, resulting in wet cameras and salt-damaged props. Steven Spielberg and the producers also had to spend ton of money to repair damages to an uncooperative robotic shark, and to salvage the sinking Orca with its actors still on board. Principal photography was supposed to take 55 days, but ended up spiraling into 159.

There was quite of lot of demand in terms of guidelines when creating an Esting for E4. The main constraint was keeping it to ten seconds. I noticed with a lot of groups in my class one of the most common problems was people having either planed too much for their Esting or not enough. Being new to animation though it was naturally difficult for us to estimate a time scale for our projects in pre-production. The next imperative guideline was that the audio of the clip had to be taken from a selection of MP3's on the E4 website due to copyright constraints. For some people this was not a problem, but for others finding the right sound clips to go over their animations was a struggle with the limited selection available. 

We didn't really have any room to negotiate our brief whatsoever. Because it was a country-wide competition, once given the set of guidelines from the E4 website we had no opportunity to speak with E4 and try get easier terms, they were set in stone. Like mentioned, copyrighted music was one of the biggest issues/constraints in planning. Myself and others had great ideas for sound/music that can go over specific clips & segments however it quickly became apparent there would be no way of implementing them due to standard industry copyright limitations. In 2016 Deadpool director, and ex-deadpool 2 director Tim Miller quit Deadpool 2 production due to 'creative differences with Ryan Reynolds'. However it was later discovered it was due to an argument between the two as to who should be cast as the new villain 'Cable'. Since Ryan Reynolds was the producing and has 'casting approval' he seemed to have own and been unwilling to negotiate resulting in Tim Miller quitting as director mid-production.

There was only one amendment I had to make to the proposed final product and that was to increase it in length. Like mentioned, never working with animation before it was difficult to estimate an amount of time when creating things like storyboards. So when I got to my last shot and edited all together I discovered it was only 7 second in length. This then resulted in me having to back into production and take another 30-40 shots. This could of been prevented with slightly better planning or consulting in someone with more experience.

Amendments may be made to a budget/fees/conditions outlines in contracts etc. for a many number of reasons. The most common might be pressure from investors. If an investor has put money into a production company but begins to worry there wont be a return on their money they may begin to apply pressure on the production, rushing everyone involved.


Someone will generally respond to a brief in order to work towards the goals/standard their employer/partner wants. Its done to communicate across a set of ideas on how to complete a task. A learnt a lot of knowledge and new skills a long the process of creating my Esting. I learnt simple key things such as 120 pictures will equal 10 seconds and animation runs in 24 frames per second. However I also learnt and developed valuable skills like patience whilst creating the animation. The project also helped develop multi-task skills, specifically during shooting.