Specifications

Your refined brief needs to

• include specifications
• show evidence of consultation with stakeholders
• show the results of your key factor research and prioritisation.

A SPECIFICATION is measurable and describes what the solution will be, or look like, or behave, or do. Each key factor should be investigated and researched to develop a specification.

When you have printed your refined brief, you could hand-write on the page where each specification came from.

Here is an example:

My husband and I are planning a 90th birthday party for my father-in-law. As part of the event, we will have a slideshow of photos of Les's life. Key factors for the slideshow include:

• content
• length
• presentation style

Key factor research tells us that "three minutes is a long stretch for time-based media. The infomercials you see on late-night TV are often three minutes long, and they feel repetitive and endless" (quoted fromMediapedia by Kit Laybourne).

This suggests an attribute: the presentation should be short.

This then becomes a specification: the presentation should be three minutes long.

Requirements

A number of students are starting to ask me whether their video is good enough. This is not for me to decide. What you need to do is:

• Check your Refined Brief for the specifications - have you done everything you said you were going to do? If not, why not?
• If your Refined Brief does not have detailed specifications, refer back to Briefing Paper 1 for what the council wanted.
• Check your assessment handout for what it requires from the video.
• Get feedback from a range of other people.
• Keep a record for your folder of each of these steps.

I suggest that you do all this before finally exporting/rendering your project files!

Briefs: Initial and Refined

Your initial brief should include:

• a statement of the problem in your own words
• who the client is
• who the stakeholders are
• what solution you are going to make

Your refined brief is written after you have done some research and consultation. It will include more details of what the solution will involve - these are called specifications. Also, any things that are definitely required - these are called constraints. You can do it by taking your inital brief and adding more details about the problem and solution.