The single biggest predictor of whether a brand film comes back great or comes back generic isn’t the production company’s talent. It’s the brief they’re working from.

We’ve shot films for clients whose briefs were two paragraphs and a Pinterest board, and we’ve shot films for clients whose briefs were 14-page Word documents with revision tracking. The two-paragraph briefs sometimes produced the best work. The 14-pagers sometimes produced great work too. The thing the great briefs had in common wasn’t length. It was clarity about a small number of things that actually matter.

This is what those things are.

The eight things every good brief contains

1. The job the film has to do

Not “make a brand film.” That’s the format. The job is the outcome — what should be different in your business after this film exists?

  • Get more enterprise demos booked from the homepage.
  • Convince Series B investors we’re a brand, not a product.
  • Make recruiters’ lives easier when targeting senior engineers.
  • Move 100,000 cans of the new SKU off shelves before the season ends.

The job determines everything else. A film built to book demos is structured completely differently than a film built to recruit engineers. Tell us the outcome, and we’ll work backwards to format.

2. The audience — specifically

“Customers” isn’t an audience. “B2B SaaS buyers” is closer. “Heads of Engineering at Series C–E SaaS companies who’ve already evaluated three competitors” is real.

The more specific you are, the more we can compose for them. The right reference, the right pacing, the right tonal register — they all change with audience.

A useful exercise: imagine one specific person who’d watch this. What’s their job? What did they have for lunch? What competitors are they comparing you against in the same week? Now write the brief for them.

3. Three reference films (and what you like about each)

Not eight references. Three. And not just links — say what specifically each one is doing well.

  • “I like the pacing of this Apollo film — slow first 20 seconds, earns the close-up at 0:30.”
  • “I like the casting in this Patagonia spot — they chose people who feel like they actually use the product.”
  • “I like the color of this Mubi trailer — the shadows hold detail without going crushed.”

This forces you to be specific about what you mean when you say “cinematic.” It also tells the production company exactly which references they should bring to the treatment.

A common failure mode: clients send a moodboard of 30 stills with no annotation. The production company guesses what you liked, which is the same as guessing.

4. The constraints you can’t change

Budget. Timeline. Geographic location. Cast you’ve already promised. Music license you’ve already cleared. Compliance review (legal, medical, financial — every regulated industry has one).

Tell us these in the first email. Burying them produces a treatment that ignores them, which produces friction six weeks in, which produces compromises on craft.

5. The deliverables

Hero cut, in what format, at what aspect ratio? How many cutdowns, in which durations, for which platforms? How many language versions? Is there a quiet (no-music) cut for trade shows?

A 90-second hero film is one project. A 90-second hero film + 3 cutdowns + vertical cuts for stories + a 6-second pre-roll + a no-music conference cut is a different project, and it costs more.

6. The decision-maker

Who has final approval? Just them, or them and a committee? Are there stakeholders who haven’t been told yet but will weigh in at the 90% mark?

This is the most often-omitted thing in briefs and the single biggest cause of post-production drag. A film that’s reviewed by one person reaches final cut twice as fast as a film that’s reviewed by a five-person stakeholder committee. We can plan for either; we just need to know which one.

7. The success metric

How will you know if this film worked?

  • Demo bookings from the homepage went up.
  • The film got 100K organic views on YouTube.
  • The CEO can stop using last year’s deck.
  • The recruiter team uses it as their first email link.

Vague metrics (“brand awareness,” “engagement”) produce vague films. Specific metrics produce films that move them.

8. The thing you’re worried about

Every project has one. The talent isn’t an actor. The location’s only available for half a day. The product visual changes monthly. The CEO’s English is their second language. The company name is changing in three months.

Tell us. We’ve worked around all of these. We can’t work around things you don’t tell us.

What we wish you’d stop putting in briefs

“Make it go viral.” Virality isn’t a product spec. The films we’ve made that went viral did so because the story was strong, not because anyone planned for the algorithm.

Six pages of competitor research with no synthesis. We can read your competitors’ websites. What we need from you is the insight — the thing you’ve noticed that they haven’t, the angle that’s yours alone.

“We want it to feel like Apple.” Apple has been refining one visual language for 20 years with hundreds of millions of dollars. You probably don’t have that. What you have is permission to have a real voice, which Apple did before they were Apple.

Comments like “make it more inspiring.” Inspiring isn’t a craft direction. “Make it slower for the first 15 seconds” is. “Cast someone who looks more like our customer than our employee” is. Translate aspiration into specifics or ask the production company to.

A brief that fits on one page

Here’s a template we wish more clients used. Fill in the blanks honestly:

Project: [Name] Format: Hero brand film, 90-second cut + 3 social cutdowns Deadline: [Date the deliverable has to ship] Budget range: $[X]–$[Y] Audience: [One specific persona, ~25 words] Job: [What changes in our business after this exists, one sentence] References: [Three films with one note each on what they’re doing well] Constraints: [Locations, talent, music, compliance, anything fixed] Decision-maker: [Name, role] Success metric: [How we’ll know this worked] Worried about: [One thing]

Eleven lines. Most of our best projects started with a brief that fit on a notebook page.

What we do with a great brief

We come back within a day with a creative read — a sense of where we’d take the project, what the treatment direction would be, and an honest budget range. If it’s a good brief, that creative read writes itself.

If it’s a vague brief, we send back questions instead. Both responses are useful; the first one is faster.

Send us yours. Even rough is fine.