BRIEF A 60 SECOND FILM

Most video briefs fail the same way. They describe the company instead of the film. A production company reads three pages about the brand story and still does not know what the first shot looks like, how fast it cuts, or what a viewer should remember nine seconds after it ends. The brief below is what we ask for instead, and it is the exact structure the Brief Builder walks you through.

Start with the one thing

A 60 second film can land one idea. Write the single sentence a viewer should be able to repeat back after watching. If you need two sentences, you have two films, and the second one is a different project. Everything else in the brief exists to serve this line, so write it first and be suspicious of every word in it.

Describe the audience as people, not a segment

"B2B decision makers 25 to 54" tells a director nothing. "Operations managers who have been burned by software rollouts and watch with the sound off on a train" tells them everything: the tone, the pace, the role of supers, whether the film can rely on voiceover at all. Write where the film runs in the same breath, because a film for LinkedIn feeds and a film for a conference screen are different objects.

Give visual feel in references, not adjectives

Premium, cinematic and clean mean something different to every person who reads them. Reference films, brands, photographs and places instead. A good visual brief specifies the palette, the quality of light, the lensing and the pace of the cut. If you cannot name those, describe things you can point at and let the production company translate. That translation is the part the Brief Builder automates: it turns a paragraph of plain description into three developed directions with palettes, light, lenses and texture.

Ask for a beat sheet before a storyboard

A beat sheet divides the 60 seconds into five to seven beats, each with a start time, a duration, what happens on screen and what it is doing for the audience. It is the cheapest document in production and the most valuable, because structure is where brand films die. The first three seconds have to earn the next five. Something has to turn in the middle third. The end lands the one thing. If a brief locks structure before anyone opens an editing timeline, revisions become notes on a page instead of re-edits.

Decide what the voice is for

Voiceover is not narration of the pictures. It does a different job: position, address, consequence. Cap it at around 2.6 words per second of screen time, keep every line under fourteen words, and leave at least one silence of three seconds or more. Many strong brand films run without voice at all, on picture and sound design alone. Decide this in the brief, not in the edit suite.

Write down what must appear, and what must not

List the mandatories: product, logo lockup, legal lines, launch date. Then list the things the film must avoid, which is usually the more useful list. Both lists belong in the brief because every one of them is a constraint the creative work has to respect from the first frame, not a note discovered at approval.

That is the whole discipline. One idea, a real audience, referenced visual feel, locked structure, a deliberate decision on voice, and the constraints in writing. The Brief Builder above walks you through exactly this and hands you the result as a PDF any production company can work from.