A Guide to Working in the Creative Media Sector #3

How to respond to a Negotiated and Informal Brief

When given a negotiated brief, you initially need to know and understand that you are not the only party involved in the production, in fact there can be sometimes up to three parties. Usually, a client won't involve more than three parties. Having to many people involved will leave plenty of room for disagreement and lack of production. A negotiated brief allows you to suggest and put forward your own ideas on how the brief you should be written and tackled. However, the other parties involved will have to agree, if there is any disagreement you will have to start over until everyone is happy. Negotiating with your client is expected, this gives you the opportunity to put forward any concerns or any of your own ideas. This could include re-scheduling the deadline, the budget or organising materials. An informal brief is very similar to this but in this brief, you are the only one involved. There are no other parties and you are the only one in contact with the client. This allows you to be creative with your ideas and design the brief to suit you in the most productive and beneficial way.

Once a negotiated brief has been confirmed, it is essential that all parties have agreed with it. Your client wouldn't be pleased with some parties unhappy with the ideas for production. To avoid this, you may like to keep referring to your client with different ideas and letting them choose their favourite before you begin any production. However, if before you have negotiated ideas with the different groups, there is no harm in suggesting minor changes along the route of production. Whereas in an informal brief, you can use your ideas without having to put it past any other parties. This allows you great room for creativity, but with this responsibility, your client will have expectations and you will have to meet them. If not your reputation will fall and other clients may look past you and not offer you briefs.

As important as it is, liaising with your client is very relaxed. In a matter of negotiating, just as much as a few simple e-mails either way could be sufficient. Both these briefs don't require much liaising with clients but if any drastic changes are made, the client should be informed. This will give the client no reason to suggest you changing the brief without their consent. The negotiated brief will require slightly more contact with the client purely because there will naturally be minor or major disagreement on an element of the brief.

It is important for both briefs that you carefully plan out your production. It is also important that you know exactly what you will need to create the product, if it be the hiring of equipment, actors/actresses or a special effects team. Along side the planning, you will need to produce documents that show how you decided upon your ideas. For example, a brief for making a TV advert will require you to produce a crew/material list, location recce, risk assessment, shot list, storyboards etc.

As the production you will need to create similar documents so that any faults during production can be repaired. This also gives the client reassurance that you or a team including you can capably repair the problem. In doing so you can build a good relationship with the client and if they are pleased with your work, may hire you for more briefs.

A Guide to Working in the Creative Media Sector #2

How to Respond to a Tender & Commission Brief

A tender brief will be designed by the client to suit your needs and make you as happy a possible with the briefs requirements. To ensure that you are happy with everything, the client would make several briefs. This allows you to pick the brief that is most suitable to you and one that you think you'll be able to create the best outcome for. This is very similar to a commission brief, in a commission brief you are able to negotiate with your client with different elements of brief. This gives you the chance to remove any unrealistic outcomes and sort them out with other realistic actions. However, by being able to negotiate the brief with the client, your expectaitions will be higher due to the fact you had an input in aspects of the brief.

When you start the develop you ideas for a tender brief, you need to make sure you stick to the exact specifications that you read in the brief. If you don't you could be left with an unhappy client and more work for you to do. Whilst working on a commission brief, you are able to keep in contact with the client throughout the task. This is so that if you come accross an area that you believe needs to be negotiated, you can easily contact the client. If you don't contact them about any changes you make, you could possibly end up going over your given budget or not getting the work done by the deadline, both resulting in a disatified client.

In most briefs, you only really liase with your client at the begging and end of the production. However, in a tender and a commission brief you are expected to to keep in contact with your client. This gives the client reasurance about how the project is going and if it is up to date.

Planning the production of the brief is something you might want get your client involved in. For example if you were making a TV sit-com, you may want to hear the clients input on what actors, musicians or special effects artists to use. Thhis will also greatly help you to understand the requirements of the brief in much more deatail. This also allows time to discuss the budget in more depth withiout having to keep reffering to the clinet about financial issues.

During the creation and final stages of production, it may help to keep a document of your actions, similar to any pre-production work you have done. Then when you are presenting the final product to your client you can use these documents to show how ideas were genreated and how the production was completed. It also gives the client a better insight to that work that you out in the project.

A Guide To Working In The Creative Media Sector #1

How to Respond to a Co-operative Brief

A co-operative brief will have other people as well as yourself involved with the final product that the client has given to you. You will be a part of a group that are all working on different elements of the brief. The team of you will need to work together to get all areas of the brief covered by giving aeach other a helping hand. However, this brief allows lots of room for disagreement. When such problems happen you will need weigh up different ideas and decide as a team which idea to use. But it is important that decisions are made as a group to ensure that you are satisfying the requirements of the client.

It is vital that the group stay in contact throughout the duration of the creation so that the final product seems as if it has been created by one person. It can't be made by just sticking everyones work together without consulting each other about what would work best. If you were creating a family based sitcom episode and you were in charge of the graphics and fonts, you wouldn't want to create title font with red, blood dripping text.

Aswell as keeping in contact with eachother, you will need to (as a group) liase with your client. However, with multiple people working on the same project, it could harder to communicate with clinet when you feel it neccessary. To resolve any contact issues, you need to negotiate with your team and work out what times are better than others to contact the client.

Once you have initailly recived the brief, one of the things you should do straight away is to check the deadline. Most of the time, everyone working on the brief will have the same dealine as eachother. So to make sure that you reach the dealine with the best possible outcome, it will help to plan out what you are going to do every day up to the deadline.

Brief Structures

• A contractual brief is outlined in an employment contract, for exampe, written work for a publication.
• For a formal brief, a meeting could be arranged or organised with the client to understand the neccessary requirements.
• A negotiated brief is where you and your client would work along side eachother, making decisions in a collaborative manner.
• An informal brief could just involve your client calling you on the telephone to discuss their requirements.
• A tender brief could involve several briefs being sent to many people to all come up with different ideas. When all the ideas are returned to the client, the best will be bought forward. A tender brief can be found in a similar style to a competition.
• A competition brief is an open brief that anyone can respond to it. Then the best responses will be rewarded.

Respnding To The Brief

Contractual Brief - When giving a contractual brief, you need to make sure you have read and comlpetely understand the content of the brief before signing. If there are some constraints that aren't realistic, check for negotiable elements that could be changed in order to suit you. If you don't read and fully understand the brief and then proceed to sign it, you are then expected to fulfill the terms of the brief. If any terms of the brief are breeched then legal action could be taken by the client against you and you could end up in court. It is important to liase with you client to provide them the confidence that you will deliver and perform to the standards they have requested. Liasing with the client will allow you to express any concerns, aswell as informing them of what has happened. You will probably be asked to liase with the client on more than on occasion. It is important to plan the work before getting started with the creation, this allows you to fully understand what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by. This also gives you time to negotiate any changes or ideas you have had whilst the planning has began. It is vital that the actual production of the work is completed by the set deadline. If it isn't, you have broken the terms of the contract and your client will not be impressed. If, prior to the signing of the contract, you don't believe possible to have created or finished you set task by the deadline, it should have been bought up with your client then.

Formal Brief - A formal brief is a written document containing specific and precise details about the goals that needs to be achieved. The brief gets straight to the point and doesn't contain any unnecessary detail or information. This allows the client to indentify what it is that needs to be done in a specific manner. This type of brief is mainly aimed at a group of people or a business company rather than individuals. A formal brief is not always a legal document.

Negotiated Brief - A negotiated brief is where (usually) two parties have different ideas from each other but they both have to come to a decision by compromising and making sure that both the parties are happy by the decision. When there are more than two parties involved it allows more room for disagreement and may result in incomplete work for the client.