A video creative brief is a document whose purpose is to collect and gather relevant information for the successful development (filming & editing) of a video. It should - at least - include a short introduction to the project, the objective of the video and its target audience, what it needs to communicate, and, of course, its technical requirements.
When people hear about video briefs for the first time, it’s natural that they think of it as not that relevant, but the truth is that having one can make or break your project. Many agencies and freelancers get this information via email or a quick call but don’t have a standardized process that assures the creative they are collecting the right data.
Furthermore, what clients say on the phone or email usually gets lost and the video producer has no way to retrieve it. That’s why it’s critical to have a brief that captures everything and that is accessible for both the agency and the client.
The only way to create something that your client will love is to comprehend which business problem they are trying to solve with the video and provide a solution that fits their needs. And what better tool than a brief to accomplish it?
If producing videos is itself an abstract job, imagine building a brief for it! But you don’t need to worry. After working with dozens of video producers and editors, we’ve developed an outline that will help you capture all the information required to make something your clients will love.
The other option is to create an account in HolaBrief and customize our pre-built brief template for video production, you choose!
As a way to introduce the agency and new people to the project, it’s a great idea to start the brief with a short overview of the company and why it came in the first place. Here are a few questions that you can include in this section:
These questions will help the video producer and editor to get the feel of the company and portray it in the final result.
The second section of this outline is to define an objective. What is the video trying to accomplish? Perhaps it’s going to be a TV Commercial and the company is looking to 7x their return on investment. Or perhaps they need a quick UGC (user-generated content) for their new TikTok campaign.
Videos can take many forms and no one goal fits them all. Be open to what your client is trying to accomplish and always have that in mind in the creative process. If you build something that generates results, they will come back to you over and over again.
No video is designed to appeal to everyone that watches it. In fact, it’s impossible. That’s why adding which is the video’s target audience is critical for its success. It’s not the same to produce a video for 60+ years old grandparents as for 27 years old attorney lawyers in New York.
When writing down the target audience and customer persona, make sure that your client is as specific as he can so that you have a clear picture in mind of who you are trying to influence. In HolaBrief, we have a collaborative and interactive exercise that you can include to make this process as engaging as possible for both you and your clients. Try it here!
Another section that’s a must-have is “key message”. At the end of the day, a video (and every form of communication) is trying to convey something and generate a specific reaction in the receiver. Get clear on what this message and reaction are so you can work accordingly.
Questions that you may include here are:
In this section, we are going to get a bit more technical. This is the opportunity to write down questions that will help you collect the specific requirements of the video: is it going to be for TV or smartphone? Is it going to appear on the Instagram Feed or TikTok? Which aspect ratio do you want the video to have? Any specific format? Will you need subtitles?
These questions will help you know exactly what you should build to fulfill their specifications. Don’t commit the mistake of skipping them and spend hours producing a perfect TV Commercial in landscape when the client wants it to be for Instagram Reels.
When you watch TV or scroll down your Facebook Feed, you constantly encounter different videos conveying different emotions. Some of them are funny, others more serious, and a few are just indescribable. Your job as a producer is to capture the tone of voice your client wants to communicate and depict it in the video.
An effective video production brief requires being crystal clear about what must be provided in order to consider the project completed. Since they are completely certain of what they will get, it provides the customer peace of mind and it also unites the creative team.
The many stages the project will take to reach its goal are known as milestones. For video production, it might look like the following:
Each milestone must have a deadline that both the client and the agency will respect.
Making a website video production creative brief - especially if it’s corporate - from scratch requires a lot of work. Additionally, there's a potential that you can make a mistake or forget to add anything important, which could have an impact on how well your project turns out.
For precisely this reason, we built HolaBrief and created tried-and-true templates for you to use and modify. You just need to choose one, alter it by adding or deleting exercises, and email it to your customer to complete.
Give HolaBrief a try and scale your video production agency to the next level!
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