The motion design glossary: terms your brief should actually use
A brief that says "make it pop" gets you a guess. A brief that says "a hard cut on a match cut, then a lower third" gets you what you meant.
The gap between a brief that works and one that doesn't is usually vocabulary. "Make it feel premium" describes a feeling; "a slow push-in with a two-second hold before the title resolves" describes a shot. Only one of those can actually be executed without a guess in the middle.
The full glossary has 16 terms, each with a plain definition and a working example. A few of the ones worth knowing before writing your next brief:
Kinetic typography — animating the letters themselves, not a caption box that happens to contain letters. Say this instead of "animated text" and the difference in output is immediate.
Lower third — the name-and-role graphic in the bottom third of frame. A precise term with strong convention behind it; naming it correctly gets you the right layout without describing one.
Match cut — a transition where two shots share a shape or composition, so the cut reads as continuous rather than as a jump. Ask for "a transition" and you might get a wipe; ask for a match cut and you get something with intent behind it.
Easing — the difference between motion that starts and stops like a machine and motion that accelerates and settles the way physical things do. "Make it feel less robotic" is asking for better easing; naming it gets there directly.
B-roll — supplementary footage cut over a main take, both illustrating what's being said and hiding the joins where the take was trimmed. Useful shorthand for "I need something to look at while this voiceover plays."
Aspect ratio — not just the frame's proportions, but a compositional constraint: a shot framed for 16:9 rarely survives being cropped to 9:16. Specifying this early avoids a piece that has to be redesigned for a second format later.
Why this matters more than it seems
None of these terms are jargon for its own sake — each one exists because English doesn't have a shorter way to say the same thing precisely. A brief written with them is not fancier, it's just unambiguous, which is the actual goal of a brief.