Free Video Production Brief Generator

What goes in a video production brief

The generator above writes these seven sections from your answers. If you are drafting one by hand instead, this is the order to write it in, and the mistake that most often makes each section unusable to the team quoting your project.

1. 1

   Project overview

   One or two sentences naming what is being made and the single outcome it has to produce.

   Common mistake: Listing three goals. A video optimized for awareness, conversion, and recruitment at once does none of them, and the production team will pick for you.

2. 2

   Target audience

   Who this is for, in enough detail that a casting or scripting decision follows from it.

   Common mistake: Writing "everyone" or a demographic bracket with no behavior attached. Age tells a director nothing; what the viewer is worried about tells them everything.

3. 3

   Key message

   The one thing the viewer should remember if they remember nothing else.

   Common mistake: Submitting a feature list. If the brief cannot pick a single message, the edit will carry all of them at equal weight and land none.

4. 4

   Creative direction

   The tone, plus one or two reference videos and what specifically you like about them.

   Common mistake: Sending references without notes. "Like this one" is ambiguous between the pacing, the color, the humor, and the voiceover.

5. 5

   Video deliverables

   Platforms, aspect ratios, runtimes, and how many cutdowns you need from the master.

   Common mistake: Forgetting the cutdowns. Deciding you also need 9:16 and 15-second versions after the shoot usually means reshooting, because the framing was never planned for it.

6. 6

   Budget and timeline

   A real range and a real deadline, including whatever fixed date is driving it.

   Common mistake: Withholding the budget to get a lower quote. It mostly produces a proposal scoped for the wrong project, and two more rounds of revision to find the number anyway.

7. 7

   Additional notes

   Brand guidelines, legal constraints, must-include claims, approvals, and anything already ruled out.

   Common mistake: Leaving out the approval chain. A brief that does not say who signs off is the single most common cause of a project running past its deadline.

Once the brief is written, put a number against it with the free Video Production Cost Estimator, and check the runtime you specified suits the platform with the Video Length Calculator. A brief that arrives with a budget range and a justified runtime gets a usable quote far faster than one that leaves both open.