If you have never commissioned a brand video before, the process can feel opaque and slightly intimidating. You know roughly what you want the finished video to achieve. You have a sense of what you like visually. But translating those instincts into a brief that produces something genuinely effective, and then evaluating whether the production company you have chosen is delivering on what you agreed, requires knowledge that most business owners have not had the opportunity to develop.
This guide covers the complete process from first instinct to final delivery, written specifically for Australian business owners commissioning brand video for the first time. By the end, you will know what good looks like at every stage, and you will have the confidence to commission a video production company as an informed client rather than a hopeful one.
Stage One: Define What the Video Needs to Achieve Before You Think About What It Should Show
The most important document in any brand video project is not the shot list or the script. It is the answer to this question: what do we need someone to think, feel, or do after watching this video? Everything else follows from this answer, and without it, every subsequent decision is made without a reliable reference point.
Be specific. “We want people to understand what we do” is not specific enough. “We want prospects who have been referred to us but do not know us well to feel confident enough in our capability and character to pick up the phone” is specific. The specificity of your objective determines the quality of the brief, and the quality of the brief determines the quality of the finished video more than any other single factor.
Once you have defined the objective, define the audience with the same specificity. Not “our clients” but the specific type of person you are trying to reach, where they are in their decision-making process when they watch the video, and what they currently think or feel about businesses like yours. This audience profile shapes every creative decision in the production.
Stage Two: Building the Brief That Gets You the Right Video
A good brief for a first brand video project covers five things. The objective: what the video needs to achieve, stated specifically as above. The audience: who is watching and what they need to take away. The brand character: how your business presents itself, what makes it different, what tone and visual register suits it. The content requirements: the scenes, the people, the locations, and the messages that need to be in the video. And the practical parameters: approximate duration, primary platforms for distribution, and any brand guidelines the production needs to respect.
Do not include a detailed prescription of exactly how the video should be structured. That is the production company’s job, and the best production companies will bring creative thinking to the brief that produces something better than a prescriptive brief would allow. Describe what you need to achieve and trust a good production company to find the best way to achieve it. If they cannot do this without being told exactly how to structure every element, they are not the right production company for a brand video project.
Stage Three: Evaluating Production Companies With Your Brief in Hand
Take the brief you have written to every production company you are evaluating and ask them to respond to it. Not with a formal proposal immediately, but with a creative conversation about how they would approach it. The quality of that conversation, the questions they ask, the creative thinking they bring, and the genuine curiosity they show about your business is more valuable than any showreel.
Watch the work they show you specifically for the qualities that will matter for your brief. Does the work feel emotionally honest? Do the people on camera look natural? Does the visual aesthetic suit the character of your brand? Does the work draw you in from the first frame? These are the qualities that will determine whether your video achieves its objective, and they are only visible in the production company’s existing work rather than in any promise about what they will produce for you.
Stage Four: Understanding What You Are Approving During Production
Professional video production involves a series of approval stages at which you review work in progress and provide feedback. Understanding what each stage is asking you to evaluate makes these reviews more productive and prevents the most common source of client disappointment, which is discovering at the near-final stage that something fundamental is not right that should have been identified and corrected earlier.
At the script or treatment stage, you are evaluating the narrative approach and the structure of the story. This is the time to raise fundamental concerns about whether the story approach is right for the objective. At the rough cut stage, you are evaluating the structure and pacing of the edit with placeholder music and ungraded footage. This is the time to raise concerns about story structure and pacing. At the fine cut stage, you are evaluating the refined edit with colour grade and music in place. At this stage, only minor adjustments should remain.
The principle is to raise structural concerns early, when they are inexpensive to address, and leave detailed refinements for later stages. Raising a concern about the fundamental story approach at the fine cut stage is expensive, disruptive, and usually avoidable if the review process is used well at the earlier stages.
Stage Five: Evaluating the Finished Video
When you watch the finished video for the first time, watch it first without stopping it to take notes. Just watch it as a viewer rather than as the client who commissioned it. After that first watch, ask yourself the single most important question: does it make you feel the way you wanted your audience to feel? Not “is everything technically correct” or “does it include everything we discussed.” Does it land emotionally in the way the objective required?
If the answer is yes, you have a brand asset. If the answer is no, the technical corrections and content additions that you might otherwise have focused on are secondary to understanding why the emotional response is not right and how to address it. The most common reason a finished video does not land emotionally is a problem in the story structure or the story selection that was visible earlier in the process and not addressed. The review and approval discipline described above is what prevents this outcome.
Working With Colourberry on Your First Brand Video
Colourberry works with Australian business owners commissioning brand video for the first time through a process that is designed to make the experience straightforward and the outcome reliable. With close to thirty years of production experience and a briefing process that starts from the strategic objective rather than the production requirements, the Colourberry team guides first-time clients through every stage of the process with the clarity and patience that genuine experience provides.
If you are ready to commission your first brand video and want to work with a production company that will make the process genuinely collaborative rather than opaque, get in touch with the Colourberry team. The first conversation is about your business, your audience, and what you need the video to achieve, and it costs nothing.
