How to Brief a Video Production Company

What a brief actually needs to do

A brief isn’t a script. It’s not a shopping list. It’s not a formal procurement document that needs to tick every box before anyone can do anything. At its heart, a brief is a conversation starter. It’s the information a production company needs to understand your world, your audience, and what success looks like, so they can come back with a creative approach that fits.

The best briefs we’ve received aren’t necessarily the longest or the most polished. They’re the ones where somebody has thought carefully about what they’re trying to achieve and been honest about what they know and what they don’t. A well-structured email works. A phone call followed by a few notes works. A shared document with some visual references and a couple of paragraphs of context works brilliantly.

What matters is that the key information is there. And if it’s not all there, that’s fine too. A good production company will come back with questions. That’s not a sign that your brief was lacking: it’s a sign they’re thinking properly about your project rather than just quoting a price and moving on.

Start with the why, not the what

The most useful thing you can tell a production company isn’t what you want to make. It’s why you’re making it. This sounds obvious, but it’s the thing that gets skipped most often. We regularly receive briefs that jump straight to the deliverable: “We need a two-minute brand film” or “We want some social content for Instagram.” That’s useful to know, but it’s not the whole picture. The question that changes everything is: what should this content actually do for your business?

A holiday let owner might say “I need a video for my property.” But the real brief might be: “My occupancy drops thirty per cent in shoulder season and I need content that sells October and November stays to couples rather than families.” That changes everything about what we’d create, from the mood and pacing to the moments we’d choose to capture.

A food brand might say “We want some recipe videos.” But the real objective might be to shift perception from a local producer to a brand that belongs on supermarket shelves nationally. Again, completely different film.

When you’re putting your brief together, spend time on the business problem before you worry about the creative solution. What’s not working? What needs to change? What would success actually look like six months after this content goes live? The more a production company understands the purpose behind the project, the better the work will be.

Who’s going to watch this?

Audience sounds like a marketing textbook term, but it’s genuinely one of the most important things to get right in a brief. Not “everyone” or “our customers” but something specific enough that a production company can picture the person sitting on the other end.

Think about who will actually encounter this content and where they’ll be when they see it. A tourism film aimed at families researching summer holidays plays completely differently from one aimed at travel journalists looking for their next feature. A brand film for a hotel that’s trying to attract corporate retreat bookings needs a fundamentally different tone from one aimed at couples celebrating anniversaries.

If you have audience research, personas, or even just a strong instinct about who you’re talking to, share it. And if you’re not sure, say so. A good production company will help you work through it. The main thing to avoid is the assumption that one piece of content will speak to everyone equally, because content that tries to talk to everyone usually connects with nobody.

There are a handful of practical things that, when included in a brief, make the whole process smoother for everyone involved. You don’t need to have all of them nailed down perfectly, but thinking through them before you brief a production company will save time and lead to better work.

Budget. This is the one that people feel most awkward about, and we understand why. But sharing a budget range, even a rough one, is one of the most helpful things you can do. It’s not about the production company spending every penny you’ve got. It’s about them designing something that delivers the best possible value within your means. Without a sense of budget, a production company is guessing: should we propose a single shoot day or three? A two-person crew or a larger team? One hero film or a full content package? If you’re genuinely unsure what things cost, say so and ask for guidance. A good production company will be honest about what’s achievable at different levels.

Timeline. When do you need the finished content? Are there hard deadlines: an event, a seasonal campaign, a website launch, a board presentation? Working backwards from the deadline is how production companies plan everything from the creative treatment to the shoot schedule and edit time. If you’re flexible on timing, that’s worth mentioning too, because it can sometimes open up options that a tight deadline wouldn’t allow.

Where the content will live. This is where a lot of briefs miss a trick. Don’t just ask for “a video.” Think about every place this content will appear. Is it a hero film for your website homepage? Instagram Reels? LinkedIn posts for a B2B audience? An email campaign? A presentation at a trade show? A silent background loop on your website? The platforms and formats matter enormously because they affect how the shoot is planned, how footage is composed, and how the edit is structured. A piece of content designed for a 9:16 Instagram Reel looks and feels completely different from a widescreen brand film, even if it’s telling the same story.

Brand guidelines and references. If you have a tone of voice document, visual guidelines, a logo pack, or any existing content that represents how your brand should look and feel, share it. Equally useful: examples of content you admire from other brands, even if they’re in a completely different sector. “We love the tone of this” or “The pace of this feels right for us” gives a production company a quick way into your aesthetic. And don’t underestimate the value of sharing what you don’t want. “We definitely don’t want it to feel corporate” or “Nothing too fast-paced” is just as useful as positive references.

People, places, and access. Will there be interviews? If so, who? Do you have locations in mind, or does the production company need to help find them? Are there access restrictions, health and safety considerations, or time-of-day constraints? Is there a key stakeholder who needs to approve things at certain stages? None of this needs to be set in stone at the briefing stage, but flagging it early helps the production company plan properly rather than discovering complications halfway through pre-production.

This is the part that most briefing guides don’t cover, and it’s arguably the most important.

The days of commissioning a single video from a production company are fading. Not because single videos don’t have value, but because the brands that get the most from their investment in production are the ones who think about the full ecosystem of visual content they need, and brief for it from the start.

A shoot day is a significant investment of time, energy, and budget. Everything is set up: the lighting, the locations, the people, the atmosphere. If you’re only capturing footage for one deliverable, you’re leaving an enormous amount of value on the table. The same shoot day that produces a hero brand film can also produce weeks or months of additional content, if it’s planned that way from the beginning.

Here’s what we mean.

A content library. From every shoot, the best individual moments can be extracted and delivered as a library of standalone clips, formatted in vertical, square, and landscape ratios for direct use across social platforms. Your marketing team or social media manager can dip into this library whenever they need a reel, a story, a carousel, or a post, without commissioning new content each time. It extends the life of every shoot by months. But this only works if it’s planned from the outset: the shoot needs to be structured to capture enough variety, enough angles, enough standalone moments that work as individual clips rather than just parts of a longer edit.

Photography. Stills shot alongside video, by the same eye, in the same light, at the same locations. This means your website photography, social media stills, and video content all feel like they belong together. Visual consistency across every touchpoint. If you need photography as well as video, mention it in your brief so it’s built into the schedule rather than grabbed as an afterthought between takes.

Website elements. Silent video headers for your homepage. Looping ambient backgrounds for landing pages. Short clips for your about page or team section. These are increasingly important for modern websites and are often completely overlooked in briefs. If your site uses or could benefit from video elements, tell your production company. It affects how certain shots are composed: a website background loop needs to be filmed with different framing and pacing than a hero film meant to be watched from beginning to end.

Social content in specific formats. Vertical 9:16 for Instagram Reels and TikTok. Square 1:1 for feeds. Landscape 16:9 for YouTube and LinkedIn. If your social team is going to need content in these formats for weeks after the shoot, that needs to be part of the brief. It changes how the day is structured, because capturing a moment beautifully in one aspect ratio doesn’t automatically mean it works in another.

The key point is this: briefing for a visual content system rather than a single video means you get dramatically more value from every shoot day. The production is already happening. The crew is already there. The locations are lit and styled. Planning for the full ecosystem of content you need turns a single project into months of material, and it costs significantly less than commissioning each element separately.

When you’re writing your brief, think about what your brand needs across every screen it appears on, not just the one deliverable that prompted you to pick up the phone.

What you don’t need to worry about

If this all sounds like a lot to think about, here’s the reassuring part: there’s a whole list of things you can leave to the production company.

You don’t need to write a script. That’s part of the creative development process that happens after the brief, and a good production company will handle it or collaborate with you on it.

You don’t need to provide a shot list. Working out what to film and how to film it is the production company’s job. That’s what you’re paying them for.

You don’t need to specify camera equipment, resolution, frame rates, or any other technical details. Unless you have very specific technical requirements for broadcast or a particular platform, the production team will make those decisions based on the creative approach and the deliverables you’ve agreed on.

You don’t need to know exactly what you want. “We know we need video but we’re not sure what kind” is a perfectly valid starting point. In fact, some of the best projects we’ve been involved in started with exactly that sentence. A good production company won’t just take your order: they’ll help shape the thinking.

The brief is your side of the conversation. It covers the business context, the audience, the objectives, and the practical constraints. The production company brings the other half: the creative ideas, the technical expertise, the production planning, and the editorial craft. Between the two, the project takes shape.

What happens after the brief

Once a production company receives your brief, the creative conversation begins. This is the stage where ideas start to form, and it’s one of the most valuable parts of the whole process.

A good production company won’t just come back with a quote. They’ll come back with questions, observations, and a creative treatment or proposal that shows how they’d approach the project. They might suggest ideas you hadn’t considered. They might push back on something in the brief that they think could be stronger a different way. They might spot an opportunity to get more from the shoot than you’d originally planned for.

This is where the relationship between client and production company really matters. The brief opens the door; the creative conversation is where the project starts to come alive. And this is also why, over time, ongoing partnerships tend to produce better work than one-off projects. A production company that already knows your brand, your audience, and your visual style needs less briefing because they’re building on a shared understanding. The brief becomes shorter, the creative conversation becomes richer, and the work gets better with every project.

The mistakes we see most often

Having been on the receiving end of briefs for over a decade, there are a handful of patterns that tend to make projects harder than they need to be. None of them are fatal, but avoiding them will give your project a much smoother start.

Briefing a production company on exactly what to shoot, rather than what the content needs to achieve, is the most common one. Over-prescribing the creative might feel like helpful detail, but it often means the production team can’t bring their best thinking to the project. Tell them what you need the content to do and let them figure out how to do it. That’s where the magic happens.

Being too vague about the audience is another. “We want to reach our customers” doesn’t give a production company enough to work with. The more specific you can be about who the content is for, the more targeted and effective the final result will be.

Forgetting about formats and platforms until after the shoot is a costly one. If nobody mentions that the content needs to work as vertical Reels until the edit stage, the footage may not have been composed for it. Always think about where the content will live before the cameras start rolling.

Not sharing budget is something we understand, but it almost always leads to mismatched expectations. A production company that knows your budget can design something brilliant within it. One that’s guessing might come back with something you can’t afford or, worse, something underwhelming because they assumed the budget was lower than it actually was.

Briefing for a single video when you actually need a content system is the one that costs brands the most in the long run. If you know you’ll need social content, photography, website elements, and a hero film, brief for all of it at once. It’s far more efficient and cost-effective to capture everything in one planned shoot than to go back for separate sessions later.

And finally, involving too many stakeholders too late in the process. If there are people in your organisation who will need to approve the final content, involve them at the briefing stage. Getting alignment early is always easier than trying to retrofit feedback after the edit is underway.

You don’t need a perfect document

The best brief you can write is an honest one. Tell the production company what you’re trying to achieve, who you’re trying to reach, what you’ve got to work with, and where you want this content to live. That’s the foundation. Everything else can be figured out together.

If you’re not sure about the budget, say so. If you don’t know exactly what kind of content you need, say that too. If the whole thing fits in an email rather than a document, that’s completely fine. The purpose of a brief isn’t to have all the answers. It’s to start a conversation that leads to work you’re genuinely proud to put your name on.

And if you’ve got a project in mind, whether it’s fully formed or still just an idea, we’re always happy to talk it through. No hard sell, no obligation. Just a conversation about what you’re trying to achieve and whether we might be the right fit.