A free tool from Visual Narrative

Brief your next video like a producer.

A free tool that interviews you the way an experienced producer would, then writes the brief for you. Works in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot. About fifteen minutes.

Send me the Brief Builder

Placeholder — your ~20-second screen recording of the tool interviewing someone goes here

The email that starts most video projects

Most video projects go wrong before anyone picks up a camera.

Not in the edit. Not on the shoot day. In the email that started the whole thing:

"We need a video, here's roughly the budget, can you send us a quote?"

I've been on the receiving end of that email for over twenty years, and I'll tell you what happens next, because nobody in this industry says it out loud. We can't tell what you actually need. So we guess. Some of us guess high and quietly pad the quote to cover ourselves, some guess low to win the work and come back for the difference once you're committed, and either way the guessing is the thing you end up paying for.

When I surveyed marketers around here about working with production companies, over half told me they'd been burned. Escalating costs. Slow delivery. "They didn't understand the brief."

I believe every one of those stories. I've also got to say the unpopular half of it: when a project goes wrong on price, scope or quality, the brief is usually the other half.

That's not a telling off. It's the good news, because the brief is the one part of this you completely control.

What a proper brief actually does for you

Every quote prices the same project

Right now you email three companies and get three numbers back. Except they aren't three prices for the same thing. They're three prices for three different imaginary projects, and the only thing you can genuinely compare is the figure at the bottom.

So you pick the cheapest. And the cheapest one is cheapest because they scoped it smallest, which you find out in month two when the extras start arriving.

Give everyone the same brief and the quotes become comparable. You're choosing on value instead of gambling on price. Most cost creep dies here too, because it starts life as something that was never in the brief.

Fifteen minutes now instead of a month of it later

I'll be straight with you. A proper brief takes longer to write than "we need a video, can you send a quote?" That's the trade.

What you get back is the month you'd otherwise lose to clarifying calls, re-briefing the same thing three different ways, and revision rounds nobody costed for.

The time doesn't disappear. It moves to the front, where it's cheap.

You walk in looking like you've done this before

Most marketers I meet have never commissioned a video and are quietly hoping nobody notices. Fair enough. It isn't your job and nobody teaches it.

A structured brief sorts that in one meeting. Your production company treats you differently, your boss can see exactly what the money is buying, and if the project does go sideways later, it won't be because of something you left out.

So I built you something

It's called the Video Brief Builder.

You paste one file into whatever AI you already use and it interviews you like a producer would. One question at a time, conversational, no forms to fill in. It won't let you away with "we want something engaging", because nobody on earth can price that.

It also catches the three traps that do the most damage:

The reference video trap.

You send a £2m commercial as your reference. It works out what you actually liked about it, because that bit is usually affordable even when the rest isn't.

The deliverables bomb.

"One 30-second video" becomes fifteens and sixes, vertical and square, subtitled, two languages. This is where budgets die.

The invisible sign-off.

Everyone who has to approve the final cut, named upfront, before your timeline turns into fiction.

Fifteen minutes later you've got a structured brief you can send to any production company.

Us, or not us. It genuinely works either way, and I'd rather you briefed someone else properly than briefed us badly.

What you get

Two files, both free:

The universal version

VN-Video-Brief-Builder.md

Copy it, paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot, hit enter. It takes it from there.

The Claude skill

VN-Video-Brief-Builder.skill

One click for Claude users. After that just say "help me brief a video" and it starts on its own.

Send me the Brief Builder

Free. Fifteen minutes. Works in whatever AI you already use.

First name

Send me the Brief Builder

You'll also get my weekly email on getting more out of video budgets. One a week, unsubscribe whenever you like.

Built by Visual Narrative, a video production company in Belfast and Dublin. We ask these questions before we quote rather than after we invoice, which is the entire point.