A good production brief is going to give you a head start for your next video project, and also provides key information for a production company to put together a quote for you.
The purpose of this guide is to give you a quick overview of our standard production brief form. This form is a great way for us to help you so that you can then help us add on your project details, and in turn we can then again help you to produce a great video to match your ultimate purpose. That makes sense doesn’t it?
Let’s get started. The first pieces of information are quite straightforward. What’s the name of your project, the key person managing the project from a client side, their contact details, and also a budget if you have that in mind. Now budget is an interesting one. We always have a mix of people who understand the general costing of producing a video, and others who are quite new to the process and unsure of what budget they have to work with. Either way, the more information you can provide in the following steps of this production form, this will help us really refine the budget and costings for you. If you’re unsure, by all means don’t hesitate adding an extra zero or two to the figure 😉
Next up is to give us some background information. Maybe a project overview or have some information about your company. Although we always like to do our research via your website, to find out more about your company. So please include your website address as well. So this is essentially the ‘what’.
The next section, is the ‘why’. Why do you need to produce this video and what’s its purpose. What do you ultimately want to achieve. You need to identify who the audience is that you want to target.
Next up is the key messages that you want to portray in this video. The more information you can provide here, the better as we’ll always work with you on refining the scripts, or perhaps it’s interview questions to best showcase those key messages. Perhaps you’ve already written a sample script and you need our help developing a shotlist. Do you know how many videos you need to produce? Is it just a one off? Or an opportunity for multiple videos in a series? Where do you want to distribute the video? DVD? Perhaps the old fashioned way? Social media, online platforms are popular choices these days. Perhaps you’re ready to showcase to a national TV audience.
Next up, what style of video is it? Do you need a presenter or actors? Perhaps its a voiceover or even just music. The tone, that’s really important. Is it a serious topic? Do you want to have fun with with it? Perhaps it’s authentic storytelling. Do you have archive footage or photos that you may want to embed in the videos. This could actually save you time and a lot of costs on duplicating filming that is content you already have.
And finally, we’d love to see examples of other video styles you hope to emulate. Perhaps it’s a mix of styles. Perhaps you’ve even seen some examples on our Visual Culture portfolio page. Now this production brief is a starting guide. Once we’ve received the completed form from you, we’ll set up a phone call or face to face meeting, to go over each section in more detail.
Having this completed production brief, means we can already move ahead in our conversations to develop the very best video project for you.