The Brief Is The Deliverable

Ask a room why a film underperformed and you will hear about the edit, the casting, the weather, the rounds of feedback. You will rarely hear the real answer, which is that three people in that room wanted three different films and nobody made them say so before the money was committed.

Production is very good at hiding this. A crew can execute an unclear brief beautifully. You get back something well made that nobody is quite happy with, and because it looks expensive, the disagreement surfaces as notes on the colour grade.

Discovery is not a formality

The first conversation is the cheapest place to be wrong, and it is the only place where being wrong costs nothing. We start by listening, which sounds like the sort of thing everyone claims, so here is the specific test it has to pass: by the end, we should be able to state the business problem in a sentence that contains no reference to video at all.

Four questions that do most of the work

Almost every ambiguity that later becomes an expensive revision is visible in the answers to these:

• Who is the one person this is for, and what do they currently believe?
• What should be different after they watch it? Name the behaviour, not the sentiment.
• Who has to approve this, and have they been in the room yet?
• What is the thing we are not allowed to say, and why?

The third one catches more problems than the other three combined. An approver who first sees the work at the review stage is not giving feedback. They are restarting the brief, at the point where restarting it is most expensive.

What a settled brief buys you

Speed, mostly, in the places that usually cost the most. Decisions on set stop being debates. Review rounds get shorter because there is an agreed standard to measure against rather than a room full of taste. And occasionally the process concludes that the film should not be made, which is an unpopular deliverable and by some distance the most valuable one.