Last updated: 12 September 2026
A brand film brief needs eight sections on one page: the commercial goal, the audience, the channel, the single message, the proof points, the tone, the success criteria and the non negotiables. Answer all eight and you have enough to build any brand film around, before anyone books a camera.
Most briefs fail in one of two directions. Too long, and the document turns into a deck nobody plans from. Too vague, and there is nothing to build a shoot around. The version below sits between the two, and it runs every project I work on.
Eight sections, in this order. Each one decides something the production cannot decide for you, which is why the page is short and still does the work of a much longer document.
1. The commercial goal. What this content needs to do for the business. Not what it should look like. What outcome it produces.
2. The audience. A specific person, not a demographic. Their role, their priorities, and the reasons they are sceptical.
3. The channel. Where this content lives. Web, paid social, owned email, sales pitches or internal. Be specific, because the format follows the channel.
4. The single message. One sentence the audience should remember afterwards. If you cannot reduce it to a sentence, the brief is not ready.
5. The proof points. Three to five things that earn the message. Real specifics: named clients, demonstrable craft, observable behaviour.
6. The tone. Two adjectives, three at most. Confident, considered, dry is a tone. Modern, professional, approachable is a list of words that mean nothing.
7. The success criteria. How we will know it worked. Quantitative if possible, qualitative if not. Defined before the shoot, not after the launch.
8. The non negotiables. Anything that must or must not be in the final piece. Talent permissions, brand restrictions, legal considerations, sensitive subjects to avoid.
That is the whole thing. Filled in vaguely, it surfaces the gaps before you have spent money on production, which is the cheapest time to find them.
They answer the wrong question first. A long brief describes how the film should look before deciding what it needs to do, and a short one names a budget and a deadline without a message to build around.
The long ones are usually agency flavoured: ten pages of moodboard, five pages of brand guidelines, three pages of audience personas, and a deliverable section that boils down to wanting it to feel premium. By the time anyone reaches the actual creative direction, the brief has stopped being a working document and started being a deck.
The vague ones are the opposite. A paragraph of context, a budget number, a deadline, and a hopeful sentence about really capturing the brand. Not enough to plan a shoot from, and definitely not enough to know afterwards whether it worked.
Three ways, and the first one costs nothing. Fill it in for yourself before the shoot, use it to screen production partners, then use it afterwards to work out why a past piece of content did or did not perform.
First, use it before the shoot. Even if you are working with a producer or agency that has their own briefing process, fill this version in for yourself. It surfaces the assumptions and the gaps in the project before the production decisions get made.
Second, use it as a screening tool for partners. When you are choosing between video or photo producers, send them the filled brief and ask what they would do differently. The good ones push back on at least one thing. The ones who nod through every section are unlikely to challenge the work in production either.
Third, use it to assess past projects. Pull up the brief from a recent piece of content you commissioned and compare it to this template. The gaps in your past briefs are usually the reasons your past content underperformed.
I fill the non negotiables section in from my side too, because that is where the practical constraints live: CASA licensed remote pilot for any aerial work, $20M public liability for sites that ask for it, and a Working With Children Check when a shoot involves students. Most of the briefs I work from come from businesses across Melbourne and the Yarra Valley.
The template is an editable PDF with the eight sections laid out and prompt questions under each one to help you fill them in. Use it on your next project, internal or external, and send it to me filled in if you want the first call to be useful.
To ask for the file, or to talk the brief through before you fill it in, brand video work starts with exactly this conversation, and you can start a project once the brief is ready. The first conversation is free, and the brief gets started in that call.
How long should a brand film brief be?
One page. Eight sections, each one deciding something. A brief that runs longer than a page has usually turned into a deck, and a brief shorter than that leaves the production team guessing.
Who should write the brief, the client or the producer?
The client writes the first draft, because the commercial goal and the proof points live inside the business. I push back on it in the first call, which is where most of the useful argument happens.
What makes a brief too vague to work from?
A missing single message and no success criteria. Context, a budget and a deadline are not enough to plan a shoot from, and they make it impossible to say afterwards whether the film worked.
Do I still need a brief for a small social video?
Yes, and it takes about ten minutes. The sections get shorter, not fewer. Skipping the brief is what turns a small job into three rounds of revisions.