How to Brief a Videographer (and Get the Video You Pictured)

When a finished video doesn't land, people usually blame the shoot or the edit. In my experience it's almost always the brief. By the time a camera comes out, most of the important decisions have already been made, or skipped.

The most common problem is a brief that describes what should be filmed instead of what the film is for. "We need a video of our office and our team" gives me very little to go on. I can make that look nice, but I can't make it work, because I don't know what working looks like.

Compare it with: "We're losing good candidates to a bigger competitor. We need something that makes someone choose us when they're sitting on two job offers." Now I know who's watching, how they're feeling, what we're up against, and roughly how long they'll give us. That one sentence shapes every decision on the day, from where we put the camera to who we interview.

What a useful brief includes

You don't need a long document. You need four things, roughly in this order.

Who's watching, and where. Someone scrolling on their phone at lunch watches very differently to someone in a boardroom, or someone who's already on your website because they're close to making a decision. The same footage needs different pacing for each.

What they should feel or do afterwards. Pick one thing. Book a call, apply for the job, trust the brand, donate. If you give me three goals, the video will do all three badly.

Where it's going to live. A six-second cut for Instagram behaves nothing like a two-minute film on your homepage. If it's going to be in several places, say so now, because it changes what we capture on the day (more on that in getting more out of one shoot day).

What's locked and what's open. Maybe the logo has to appear in a certain way, or the CEO has to be in it, or legal needs to see a script. Tell me. Equally, tell me what you're happy to leave to a creative call. That's usually where the good ideas come from.

A good brief describes what success looks like for whoever has to justify the spend afterwards.

Different clients, different briefs

Two clients can want "a video" and need completely different things. A real estate business running monthly content for its agents doesn't need a fresh creative concept every month. It needs a format that works over and over, looks consistent, and can be turned around quickly. A health charity telling one person's story needs almost the opposite: time, patience, and the space to follow the emotion wherever it goes.

When I worked on the Arthritis NZ hero video, the brief wasn't "show people with arthritis". It was about changing how people see the condition and reaching a younger audience. That's what led us to a roaming, circling camera that built energy through the piece. A different brief would have produced a very different film.

Where briefs usually go wrong

I see the same three patterns again and again.

The first is the adjective brief. "Professional, dynamic, high-energy, premium." Nobody disagrees with those words, and nobody can act on them either. Every video on the internet is trying to be professional.

The second is a brief written for the person approving the budget rather than the person watching the video. You can tell because the tone suits a boardroom, not a customer.

The third is skipping the "where does it live" question. It quietly assumes one video can do a job that really needs three or four different cuts for different places.

A simple way to write one

If you're staring at a blank page, work through these:

1. Name the audience and the moment. Who's watching, and what are they doing just before and just after?
2. Name the one thing they should feel or do.
3. List every place the video needs to appear, including formats (landscape, vertical, square).
4. Split your requirements into "must have" and "open to ideas".
5. Find three videos you like, from any industry, and write one sentence on why each one works for you.

That last step does more than anything else. Three links with honest notes like "I love how calm this feels" or "the interviews feel like real conversations" tell me more than a page of adjectives.

Treat the brief as a starting point

A good brief holds the goal steady and leaves room on how to get there. Things change on shoot days. Someone gives an answer in an interview that's better than anything we planned, or the light does something we couldn't have scheduled. If the goal is clear, it's easy to see whether a change serves it.

I'd honestly rather get a rough brief with a few real reference videos than a polished one full of buzzwords. If you're not sure where to start, skip the document and just send me three links with a line on each. We can build the rest together in a conversation.