How to brief a video production company

Most briefs we receive are either two lines long or thirty pages. Both make quoting harder than it needs to be. What a production company actually needs sits in between, and you can usually write it in half an hour.

You do not need a script

A common reason briefs get delayed is the belief that you have to arrive with the idea fully formed. You do not. Scripting is part of the production, and a good producer would rather shape it with you than receive something already locked that does not suit the format.

What we need is enough detail to understand the job, price it honestly and tell you whether the deadline is realistic.

The six things worth writing down

1. Who it is for, and where it will play

A film for a boardroom, a fifteen second cut for paid social and a piece that loops silently on a trade stand are three different productions. Channel drives length, framing, captioning and how many versions come back at the end. Name the channels early, even if the list changes later.

2. What you want someone to think or do

One sentence. Understand a change. Apply for a role. Book a tour. If it cannot be written in a sentence, the video is usually carrying too many messages and will underperform on all of them.

3. The deadline that actually matters

Not when you would like it, but the date it is tied to. A conference, a campaign launch, a board meeting, the start of a recruitment round. Real dates change what is possible and they change the quote.

4. Who has to approve it

This is the one most briefs leave out, and it affects the timeline more than anything on set. Two approvers is a different project from nine. Tell us who signs off, at what stages, and whether legal or a government body is involved.

5. What already exists

Brand guidelines, previous films, footage from last year, an existing logo animation, photography. Reusing what you have is often the cheapest way to raise the production value, and it keeps the piece consistent with everything else you put out.

6. A budget range

Not the exact figure. A range. It is not a negotiating position, it is how a producer decides whether to propose one shoot day or three, one camera or six, and whether animation is on the table. A brief without any budget signal usually comes back as a quote that is wrong in one direction or the other.

What good looks like

Here is a brief that is genuinely enough to work from:

We need a three minute film explaining our new service to existing customers, plus vertical cut-downs for LinkedIn and Instagram. It has to be live by the fifteenth of March for our conference. Two approvers, our comms manager and our GM. We have brand guidelines and drone footage of the site from last year. Budget is somewhere in the fifteen to twenty five thousand range.

That is six sentences and it is enough to quote, schedule and start planning.

What happens after you send it

At our end, a brief like that turns into a call, then a treatment and a schedule. One producer stays across scope, feedback and approvals so nothing gets lost between suppliers. If something in the brief is not going to work, you hear it before the shoot rather than after.

If you have something on your list and you are not sure it is ready to send, it probably is. Tell us what you are working on and we will come back to you within 24 hours.