November 5, 2025
How to brief a video team so you get footage you can use
The quality of your video is set in the briefing call, before anyone touches a camera. Here is what a useful brief contains.
Bad briefs sound like this: we want something modern and clean, about two minutes, here is a video we like. Six weeks later a modern, clean, two-minute video arrives, and nobody knows what to do with it. The crew did their job. The brief failed.
A useful brief answers three questions the reference-video approach skips entirely.
The three questions
What should this video change? Pipeline, hires, awareness, a room's energy at a kickoff. Name the outcome and the team can make a hundred small decisions correctly without asking you.
Where will it live? A LinkedIn feed video and a keynote opener are different species. The feed video needs to work silent and grab in two seconds. The keynote opener has a captive audience and a sound system. One video rarely does both jobs well, and knowing the venue up front is the difference between footage you use and footage you archive.
Who has to say yes? If the CEO reviews the final cut, their taste belongs in the brief, not in a surprise round of notes at the end. Tell the crew who approves, what that person cares about, and what they have hated before. Revision rounds are where timelines and budgets go to die, and most of them are preventable with one honest sentence in the brief.
Give a video team those three answers and even an average crew will deliver something useful. Skip them and the best crew in the world is just guessing expensively.
Got something big coming?
Tell us what the video needs to do. If we're a fit, you'll have a plan and a number within 48 hours.