Writing a Video Brief
Every production company will have a slightly different approach to this but, ‘The Brief Brief’, the first step in our Q4 Production Process is a great place to start and will help give Video Production Companies a good sense of what you’re looking to do.
The Audience
Perhaps the most critical thing to focus on when planning video content is the audience.
Specifically, the ‘Who’ of the audience, what personas or avatars are you wanting to communicate your message with? The clearer you can be about this, the easier it will be to focus you key messages to address their needs.
Another important element of the audience is the ‘How’, as in ‘how will they be watching this video? Video content made for social media (played on a small screen, often without sound) is critically different from videos made for Trade Shows (often looped on a screen used as a selling aid) or Testimonial or Corporate Videos that will sit on a website and will usually be played with the sound on.
There are also some platform-specific considerations if the content is to be presented as a social media story or another platform where video elements can increase your exposure.
Finally, the ‘what’, as in ‘what would you like your audience to do after they have seen your video?’. This is important as it helps you clarify your key messages, and it helps us to produce a video that will generate results for you.
As with any marketing, keeping us across who your audience is (with as much clarity as possible) is a great foundation for us understanding your video project.
The Overall ‘Look and Feel’
While we’ll need you to help us understand your brand and aesthetics, locking in an understanding of the ‘Look and Feel’ you’re after is really important.
One easy way of communicating the look and feel of what you’re looking to produce is to show us some videos that you’ve seen that you like and feel would work well. Other video examples give us a good sense of things like editing pace, production values, shot composition, music choice and generally what we love to call the ‘Look and Feel’.
The clearer we can be about what you’re looking to do in this regard, the more likely we are to nail it!
The Deliverables
Now we’re into the best bit. The actual videos you’re looking to produce as part of your project.
In this section, we ask for a bunch of detail around the specifics of the videos you’re producing:
Working Title
This is just so we’re all referring to the video by the same name – we can change the actual title much later in the process, often the working title might start something as simple as ‘Case Study #1’ or ‘Product Video #4’ and will often become more detailed and descriptive as things progress.
Rough Length
We can help guide you with this is you aren’t sure – but usually, it’s between 30-120 seconds for a lot of our content, sometimes its a bit longer if you have a captive audience.
Video Aims
It’s important to know if the individual videos within a project or campaign have unique aims or if it’s one unified aim across all deliverables.
Video Placement
This is so we understand where the finished video will go. Does it need to be 1:1 aspect ratio and running less than 60 seconds for an Instagram feed post, or does it need to be filmed in a vertical 9:16 frame for Facebook stories for example?
Additional Notes
Names of people appearing on the video with their titles, details about specific locations or other important info for that video.
Then comes the best bit …
Key Messages
For each video, we ask you to identify 3-5 key messages that you’d like to communicate. We use these key messages as the core of your on-camera interview. In the edit process we use these same key messages to guide us in which elements fo the interview we include.
Key Visuals
Then, we also need some ‘Key Visuals’ that match with your key messages. This gives us something to show, while the audience is hearing your key messages. For example, some vision of a friendly encounter between your customer service team and a customer, while the audio from the interview is describing your approach to customer care.
We do all our planning in a collaborative way using Google Docs – Let us know if you’d like access to a google doc version of our planner.
Why Choose ANGRYchair?
Life is too short and you’re too busy to waste your time making bad videos.
Your brand deserves awesome videos.
When it comes to selecting a video production company, we think you should ask: Is the end product excellent? Is the process easy and hopefully fun? And, most importantly, is the process and the output exactly what your brand needs?
We love making content that is perfect for your brand, and above all else, we love making it FOR YOU! It’s all about you and your brand.
We know lots about video production. We’ve developed a production method in-house that we think marries the best in production techniques, and ‘hacks’ to make it as easy and efficient for you and your team as possible. We call it the Q4 Production Method. It’s simply a way of making refreshingly authentic video content that makes your people and your brand look authentically sensational.
We look after the whole process so you can focus on what you’re good at.
We’d love to chat and see if we can help you get started.