Video Production Brief – 10 Essential Points
Daryl Burney
- May 21, 2020
- 10:00 am
- No Comments
Before engaging a production company, I highly recommend this Video Production Brief to get you off to sterling start.
The key to getting the most for your investment and producing content that gets the results you need starts before a single frame is produced. It starts before you even contact a production Company.
There are a plethora of creative content options and ideas. If you get courted by the wrong director or swayed toward the wrong type of content it’s very hard to undo what you’ve started.
To help you make the right choices and produce content that is the right type for you and your audience and most importantly to keep it on budget, I’ve created a 10 point video production brief guide, that will help refine your ideas and your conversation when it comes time to talk with a creative team. This checklist will help you not only ensure you are creating the right type of content with the right purpose and outcome, it will save you time with your production company of choice and result in substantial cost savings.
I know this will help you in your creative content journey.
The core for any content is who is going to watch it.
You can’t please everyone. No one can. Don’t think about whether your best friend will be proud of it, or your Mum or partner. The only person who matters is the person you are targeting for the video. Knowing your audience is the first and foremost question and it will form the foundation for all questions after that.
Knowing your audience will ultimately enable you to be very clear about what you need and what works, whether it be messaging or style. Every step of the way ask yourself “what would my key audience think?” Be brutally honest. It’s sometimes not easy but it will help remove too many unwanted and distracting messagings from your video.
Who is your priority audience and what is their demographic group?
If you do have a broader audience or a few different specific audiences then versioning may be an option for you. I address that further down so for now list down your priority audience first.
What are your mandatory messages?
Try to stick to as few as possible to maximise retention, or consider separate shorter videos for each message. Your production company can help you with ideas for multiple messagings.
What take away message do you want the audience to retain after watching the video?
Basically if I asked a viewer a day after watching the video what it was about or how it made them feel, what would you want them to say?
Is there a call-to-action at the end of the video?
Ask yourself whether the video would promote an event or action, or maybe even a hook to watch the next video.
What style of content do you think would work for your video? Do you envisage animation or fiction/non fiction filming?
If you have seen something you like online this is the time to collate those links. If you aren’t overly creative or lack the industry lingo this can help greatly to provide an insight to what you are visualising. Your creative team can take it from there.
What platforms or dissemination methods will you be using? Social, internal, on-air?
This will help the creators determine formatting, techniques and structure styles.
Duration of your content?
This can largely be determined by the above question about platform or dissemination, as there are proven guidelines as to what works best for each delivery method. Often this can result in long and short versions of the same content. (See next question)
Do you require different versions of the video for different purposes?
This is the time to try to please a few more audiences. You may require different language versions or a feature version and cut downs for social, or maybe you need a version for internal staff that has sensitive information and one that is ok for public viewing.
What is the sign-off procedure?
It’s a good idea to determine who has final creative sign off and to stay aligned with them. Content can get dragged in many directions according to individual and department agendas if not controlled. If this does happen, versioning is an option.
And finally after all the fun is over it’s time to deliver. Is there a hard delivery date?
Having a delivery date allows the production company to work backwards and determine an optimum schedule for your production.
Finally, enjoy the process. Trust the people around you. With this information at the ready you can be assured that your creatives will stay on course so you can sit back and watch them do what they love to do, create.
If you want to chat more about ideas or production, we are always here to help you on your journey. If it is out of our scope or capacity, we are very well connected, and can recommend trusted people in the creative industry around Asia Pasific.
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