How to Brief a Video Production Company
You don't need a perfect brief to start a conversation with a production company. Most of the best projects we've worked on started with a client who had a clear goal but a lot of open questions. That's normal. That's what the first call is for.
What a brief does, even a rough one, is give both sides something to react to. It gets the conversation to the useful part faster. Here's what's actually helpful to think through before you reach out, and why each piece matters.
1. WHAT YOU'RE TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH
You don't need to know exactly what kind of video you need. What's more useful is knowing what you're trying to accomplish with it.
Are you trying to explain something complex in a simple way? Build trust with a new audience? Give your sales team something compelling to share? Capture an event before it's gone? Celebrate a customer relationship publicly?
The goal shapes everything: the format, the length, the tone, the approach. If you come to us with a clear goal and an open mind about how to get there, we can help figure out the rest together.
2. WHO'S GOING TO WATCH IT AND WHERE
Where a video lives changes how it should be made.
Something that plays on a homepage has different requirements than something running as a paid social ad, looping at a trade show, or sitting in a sales rep's email signature. The viewing context (screen size, sound on or off, how long someone's attention lasts) shapes every creative decision.
If you know where the video is going, tell us. If you're not sure yet, that's a fine place to start the conversation. We'll ask.
3. WHAT YOU WANT PEOPLE TO FEEL OR DO
This is the most useful single line in any brief.Not the formal objective or the brand messaging. Just the honest human answer to: what should someone think, feel, or do in the moment after this video ends?
It doesn't have to be polished. "We want people to trust us enough to book a call" or "we want our employees to feel proud of where they work" are exactly the kind of answers that help us make better creative decisions. You'd be surprised how much a single honest sentence like that can focus a production.
4. TIMELINE
When does this actually need to be ready?
A real deadline (a launch date, a conference, a campaign go-live) is more useful than a quarter. If there's a specific reason for the date, share it. It helps us understand where there's flexibility and where there isn't, and it means we can build a schedule that protects the time you actually need.
If you don't have a hard date yet, a general sense of urgency is still helpful. "We'd like this done before summer" is enough to start planning.
5. BUDGET
We know this one can feel uncomfortable to share. It doesn't need to be.
You don't need a precise number. A range, or even a gut sense of the scale, is genuinely useful. Without some sense of budget, building a scope from a brief alone is guesswork. The same creative goal can be achieved a dozen different ways depending on what you're working with, and the variables (crew size, shoot days, locations, post complexity) stack up quickly. Knowing roughly where you're at lets us make real recommendations rather than presenting an approach that looks great on paper but needs to be rebuilt once budget enters the conversation.
If you don't have a number yet, that's fine. Just know it will come up early on. For a full breakdown of what actually moves the budget needle, read our post on the biggest cost drivers in video production.
6. EXAMPLES OF WORK YOU LIKE
This is one of the most useful things you can bring to a first conversation, and one of the easiest to put together.
Don't overthink it. A few links to videos, or anything visual, that capture a tone, a pace, or a feeling you're drawn to tells us more than a paragraph of descriptive copy ever could. They don't have to be from production companies or even from your industry. A film, a commercial, a documentary clip: anything that made you think "that's the feeling we're going for" is worth sharing.
If you've had a video made before that missed the mark, showing us that is just as useful.
YOU DON'T NEED TO HAVE IT ALL FIGURED OUT
The best briefs we receive are honest, not comprehensive. A few sentences on each of the above, even if some of them are "we're not sure yet," is enough to get a useful first conversation going.
We'll ask the questions that are missing. That's our job. Yours is just to come with a real goal and a willingness to figure out the rest together.
Start a project → https://www.zodm.co/contact
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Zero One Digital Media is a video production company based in San Francisco with crews in New York, Los Angeles, Austin, and Seattle. We produce brand films, product videos, commercials, event coverage, and customer stories, script to screen.