How to brief a corporate video so it does not need re-editing
- Film
- Process
Almost every painful corporate video revision traces back to a decision that was never made. Not a bad decision. An absent one. The crew shot what they were told, the edit reflects the footage, and the review meeting is the first time anyone said out loud what the film was supposed to do.
Six decisions, made before the shoot, remove most of that.
Who is watching, and where
"Our stakeholders" is not an audience. A film for a national sales conference, played on a 20 foot screen to 400 people who already work for you, is a different film from one embedded on a landing page and watched on a phone with the sound off. The first can open slowly. The second has eleven seconds.
Decide the primary screen. Everything else follows from it, including whether you need burned in subtitles and whether the logo can be small.
What it has to make someone do
A film that is meant to make a distributor feel confident is not the film that makes a graduate apply for a job, even if both are "about the company". Write the one sentence that starts "after watching this, they should" and put it at the top of the brief.
Who speaks, and who does not
Get the list of on camera contributors approved before the shoot, not after. The most expensive revision in corporate film is discovering in the review that a director whose face is in the cut has left the company, or that a name was missed and the film now has to be re-opened to include them.
The one number
Corporate films that work almost always carry a single figure: forty years, nine plants, two million households. Pick it before the shoot so the interviews can be steered toward it, rather than hoping it emerges in the edit.
How many cuts you actually need
One film is rarely one film. A twelve minute documentary for the conference, a three minute version for the website, six vertical cuts for social and a thirty second title sequence are all the same shoot if you plan for them, and four separate jobs if you do not. Deciding this before the shoot changes what gets filmed: vertical cuts need vertical coverage, and you cannot crop your way out of it later.
Where the lock is
Name the point at which the edit is final, and name who signs it. Two structured revision rounds and then a lock is a normal, workable arrangement. "A few small changes" arriving from four people over three weeks is not a revision process, and it is the reason film budgets overrun.
None of this is about creativity. It is about deciding six things in a meeting that takes an hour, so that the four weeks of work afterwards are spent making the film better rather than making it different.