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.