You have two choices with this lesson, watch me discuss the issue in the video below, or read the full text.

The Template

The most recent briefs I've made have been for my "Megastructures" Book Project, where I have a set of 6-7 artists helping me painting illustrations of enormous megastructures.



So I went and took one of my old briefs and redid it using my new format. You can see it below. So this would be what I would hand off to an artist who was working on the project.

Click either image to see a higher res one...

• Title: The title of the brief. The project name and the specific concept name from the project.
  
• The 5 Ws: (you don't have to specifically split this up, it can instead be just a "description" paragraph, but make sure your paragraph has all 5 of these questions answered)
  
• Who? If designing a character, this is telling the person about who the character is. If designing a prop, this is who would use this object.
  
• What? What is it? How does it work? If designing a character, this might be describing the character's job. If designing an environment or prop, this is the description of the thing itself.
  
• Where? Location of the thing being designed. A little more context on how the item works in the film / game. For example, if you're designing a crate, will the crate be in a specific part of the game? Will it be everywhere?
  
• When? If someone isn't familiar with the project, it's important to know the time period of the object. Like if you're working on a military shooting game, is it civil war era? World War I? Modern? Near Future? Far Future? That key bit of info will change your approach a lot to how you design.
• Why? What is the purpose of this character, prop or environment in the project you are making. If the what is a spaceship, why is describing the purpose of the spaceship.
  
• More Context:
  
• Emotion: What emotion is the design supposed to convey? Anger? Fear? Joy? Like if you're designing Darth Vader, this would be "Scary" or "Power".
  
• Scale: How big is the object? How tall is the person? Are there other dimensional metrics you need to know like how heavy the object should be? Or does the handle on a weapon need to be a specific size to accommodate the character being able to grab it.
  
• Technical Specs:
• Deliverables: What you want to see from the concept artist. Is the final deliverable a detailed painting? Do you want to see 10 thumbnails before approving one before doing the final painting?
  
• Style: Should the final painting be whimsical? Should the final result look photo real? Should it look flat shaded like an old comic book?
  
• Schedule: Sometimes this is more specifically outlined in a contract, but generally it's a decent idea to say something in here like "Due July 1st", or 5 days of work on this, etc.
• Final Res and Aspect Ratio: Does the final painting have to conform to a specific aspect ratio? And what's the minimum resolution the imagery should be? What final image format (TIF? jpg?)
  
• Reference:
  
• Art Period: A few words describing the overall artistic style of the world. Most projects can be broken down into a word or two that tells you the style. For example, is your world is a cyber-punk gothic style? A post apocalyptic solar punk? An accurate representation of ancient Greece?
• Reference Materials: A number of images to use as reference. A few notes: 1) Also super helpful, a little note on each saying what the reference is for. As an example, if I include an image of a forklift because I like how the rust covers the metal, but I don't say that's what I like the image, the concept artist may think it's the overall shape of the forklift you like. 2) When possible, I try and include the credit for the reference images. Not only is it the right thing to do to credit the original artists, but it gives the concept artist a start looking up further reference from the sources. 3) I try as much as possible to include reference of photos, as opposed to other artists work, since using original source references helps avoid just reinterpreting exactly what has been done before.

• Title: Megastructures Book Project - The Dyson Sphere
  
• The 5 Ws:
  
• What? A Dyson Sphere is a structure that encompasses a sun to capture a large portion of its output energy. The energy would be used for various purposes by the civilization that constructed the sphere, such as powering super computers, providing a living area for its inhabitants, and other industrial uses. A Dyson Sphere can come in 3 varieties: a Dyson Swarm, a Dyson Bubble, and a Dyson Shell. The Dyson Swarm is a cloud of smaller satellites that orbit the sun, possibly at a distance of 1 AU (the distance earth is from the sun), but could be closer or further to the sun, all the distance would effect would be the number of satellites necessary to form the sphere. The Satellites could be something similar to O’Neill Cylinders, which could capture the sunlight as well as provide habitable area to the population. The advantage of the Swarm is you can start with a smaller number of satellites, and incrementally add more as time goes on to capture more and more of the star’s power. The disadvantage is the work required to make sure the satellites don't collide. The Dyson Bubble would also be made from separate satellites, but instead of orbiting, they'd be statites, satellites with large light sails that would use radiation pressure to counteract the star's gravitational pull, and allow the satellites to hover above a stationary position around the sun. This has the advantage of avoiding collisions, since they remain in the same spot. The Dyson Shell is a solid sphere that completely encompasses the sun, capturing 100% of its power output, and provides an enormous area for people to live on in the interior surface. A sphere built at 1 AU would have a surface area of 550 million times the surface area of Earth. Various gates could be constructed to allow space traffic to leave and enter the sphere. The shell design has a number of large problems with it though. First, keeping the sphere centered around the star would be hard since there would be no net gravity from the star holding the sphere in place. Second, any society living on the inside surface of the sphere would not be pulled through gravity to the shell, instead they'd tumble into the star. This could be fixed by rotating the sphere to create spin gravity, however the majority of the population would have to live around the equator to take advantage of the gravity, basically turning the habitable part of the sphere into a Niven Ring, with the poles of the sphere being used exclusively for energy collection. And finally, you'd always have noon-time sun, requiring some sort of sun shield to create fake day and night cycles.
  
• Who? Humans in the far future.
  
• Where? Created in our solar system, or a neighboring one.
  
• When? Far Future, since creating such a device is far beyond our current technology.
• Why? To capture the majority of its output energy.
• More Context:
  
• Emotion: A bright future showing amazing human achievement!
  
• Scale: Large enough to encompass a sun.
  
• Technical Specs:
• Deliverables: at least 3 thumbnails, upon approval, 1 final painting.
  
• Style: Anywhere between Realistic to Photo real.
  
• Schedule: Due October 1st 2020
• Final Res and Aspect Ratio: At least 3k in the longest dimension. Either 0.8 aspect ratio (for vertical images), 1.4-1.6 aspect ratio (for horizontal images) or 2.39 aspect ratio (for wide screen images)
  
• Reference:
  
• Art Period: Nasa style painting crossed with a photo real effects movie like Elysium.
  
• Reference Materials: See the Reference Material and commentary I provided in the image of the brief above. Also note, for this concept brief, I couldn't include real life reference photos since nothing even remotely like a dyson sphere exists in real life. Also, in a real brief there may be 1-2 more pages of reference images, just did 4 to show you the idea.
  

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