There are 8 types of brief that are used these days, these are as follows:
Contractual, Negotiated, Formal and Informal, Tender, Cooperative and Competition.
Contractual brief – This type is pretty straight forward and involves a legal bonding via contract, both parties sign a mutual agreement which, if broken or abused, can be used to take the other party to court. The benefits of this brief type is that it is very straight forward, therefore avoiding any confusion of what is to be expected of the contact and of the client. This form of brief is useful as it protects both parties legally, however the client may add some small print which may cause some issues with the employee and if they don’t spot it then they may be in some trouble.
Formal brief – This form is filled with detailed information of what the client/company expects, it tries to avoid adding any extra unnecessary parts and ultimately gets straight to the point. The advantage of this brief type is that it is concise and clear as it tends to refrain from issuing too many legal terms, it also provides the ability to work around the brief and is quite flexible yet, it is not always a legal binding contract. However it has its disadvantages too such as; it is possible for the client and employee to disagree on each others terms and opinions which may be listed in said contract.
Informal brief – This form of brief is mainly verbal and doesn’t usually require much writing, the client simply describes the brief and what is expected to the employer. This form of brief is good as it is one of the more flexible ones, due to its lack of writing it allows the rules or guidelines to be stretched slightly and allows the employee to add opinions and try to influence how the brief is. However this also comes as a disadvantage as the client can twist the brief and cause the employee to have to work under conditions that they may deem unethical or uncomfortable.
Co-operative Brief – This form of brief involves two or more production companies that may work together in order to finish the assigned task, the task at hand must be completed by the deadline or else all companies involved may go downhill and start to lose clients. This form of brief has its advantages mainly because it allows you to spread out the work between your workforce instead of trying to independently work on a brief and rush it because it’s a lot of work. It helps to build communication skills too among the employees, this may lead to them being able to transfer these skills to other workplaces. This has it’s downside too as the team may have different opinions on certain things, this can cause a mishap and the final product may not be as good as the client wishes it to be.
Negotiated – This form of brief involves both client and employee agreeing on terms and agreeing to the demands and requirements, this brief form must include an agreement on both sides as it may cause lots of issues in the future, to clarify and smooth any issues between both parties there may be some final ideas and products ready from both and/or either parties. The advantage of this brief type is that it involves having to include ideas and evidence to strengthen the trust in the brief and developing the brief around the ideas in order to please both parties and merge them into one big idea. However like the other briefs; negotiated briefs have their downside as the actual negotiation period may go on for too long or may be postponed by either parties which will weaken the trust and may cause some disagreements.
Commission – This form of brief is used between two media companies, a smaller independent company may approach a producer regarding work, for example the BBC may commission a smaller company to create a series of shows for them such as ‘A question of sport.’ The advantage of this is that the independent company will receive all of the payment for the work done and even some of the larger company’s profit that they have made on the final product. Alternatively the larger company may become greedy and may not even pay the smaller company the full amount or credit them for their work.
Tender – This brief is a little bit like the TV show Dragon’s Den in that lots of potential employees pitch an idea to the bigger company and hope to be picked and work on the big idea, then the client will pick the best one to be hired under the client brief. The upside to this is that the potential employee will be more motivated to work on their pitched idea and put more focus and effort into creating a pristine quality product, this therefore makes them more productive. However for this brief to work there has to be an element of competition which can lower morale among the people on the losing company especially if it was their first big break in a while and they lost it.
Competition – This leads on to the final brief type, competition is created among lots of potential candidates as the brief is made public for anyone to apply and search for. Each corporation creates its own brief then they are judged and proclaimed as winner, then the leads on to publication of the brief and working for the corporation.A advantage of this is that lots more companies will have higher chances as it is open to people with very little or no experience at all, this can make these other companies shine and show how good they are. However once again there is a disadvantage to this form brief it is that the winner of the free-of-all may have to still pay a fee to be crowned winner officially, this may cause the company to want to pull out of the job opportunity as they may be forced to give up quite a large portion of their income just to potentially earn more or equal to the amount they lost.
Part B
The company is called Zenna Games, they are looking to develop a mobile/tablet game as they have recently released a string of popular and successful games. They are an independent game company and they want diversity in their games.
They would like at least 6 models created by from scratch as well as 2 animated items and a minimum of 2 characters that are incorporated into the game.
This is fine for me as I have previous experience with modelling and animating, this suits me because one of my strengths is modelling.
The assets should be good as they are made by me and I am somewhat strong at modelling assets.
I will definitely need to improve my animation skills in order to improve the quality of my work and make it as close to industry standard as possible.
Zenna Games has only provided a small amount of information, however The Behemoth is another company similar to Zenna Games as they are also a small indie game company, The Behemoth has a specific graphic style which is usually cartoonish or celshaded, this is because they market to kids and their games don’t feature too many bad things. They mainly focus on small indie games or games that get produced on the Xbox Live MarketPlace, their most successful games include; BattleBlock Theatre and Alien Homid. They may require more animators or modellers for their next game which would suit me perfectly as that is one of my strengths.
https://moodle.southdevon.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/521595/mod_resource/content/0/bbc-content-invitation-to-tender-question-of-sport-october-2016.pdf
This is an example of a brief, writing the tender for this brief requires a lot of work and effort, to fulfil the requirement you must write out every little detail, the big company then looks over all the terms and you will need to go through the 4 stages to progress towards becoming employed by the bug company, for example the link above shows how ‘A Question of Sport’ would go through the tender process, first you start with ‘tender eligibility’ so you get checked to see if you’re ok to be accepted for the job. The second stage is ‘tender submission and short list’ this means that you get considered after being checked as ok and then you are placed on the shortlist for the job. Stage 3 is the interview when you go to meet the client and discuss matters further. Stage 4 is when you get the ‘award’ or you get taken on as an employee and made to continue to produce the show that was stated.
SWOT Analysis
Strengths:
Keyframing in Adobe After Effects
3D modelling
Pre Production
Concept design
Weaknesses:
Moving Puppets in Adobe After Effects
essays
Opportunities:
The college provides macs for me to work on
The software on the macs allows me to create models and animations
I am currently building a PC strong enough to run the software I require so I can do college work at home too
Threats:
most people in the college as we will all be fighting for a spot in Universities and for the best marks and grades
Other people applying for jobs in the industry
software/technology not working at times when I really need them to
ting in a professional way.
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