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.
Most video projects go wrong before anyone picks up a camera. They go wrong in the brief.
When I surveyed marketers about working with production companies, over half told me they'd been burned. Escalating costs. Slow delivery. "They didn't understand the brief."
The good news is 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
You email three companies and three numbers come back. Nowhere near each other.
They aren't three prices for one job. They're three prices for three different imaginary projects, because nobody told any of us what we were pitching for.
So we guess. Some guess high and pad it to cover themselves. Some guess low to win the work, then come back for the difference once you're committed. Either way, the guessing is the bit you pay for.
Give everyone the same brief and it changes. Same scope, comparable numbers, and you can see which of them has actually thought about it. 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
Let's be honest, a proper brief takes a while to write.
However 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 pre-production, where it's cheap and easy to fix.
You walk in looking like you've done this before
Most marketers have commissioned video before. Half a day at an event, a few talking heads.
Then someone hands you a five figure budget and tells you to make something happen, and you find out how little of that experience carries over. Larger scope. Multiple filming days, multiple locations, bigger expectations. And a lot more to lose if the brief is wrong.
Fair enough. Nobody teaches this, and it isn't your job.
A structured brief makes everything easier. Your production company treats you differently, your CFO 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.
WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT OUR BRIEF BUILDER?
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.
You'll also get my weekly email on getting more out of video budgets. One a week, unsubscribe whenever you like.
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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.
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