Most brand films don't fail because they look bad. They usually look fine. The lighting is nice, the drone shot is lovely, the music swells in the right place. They fail because nobody can remember what the film was actually trying to say, including, quite often, the people who paid for it.
We've been making these films long enough to have made a few of the forgettable ones ourselves. So this isn't a lecture from on high. It's a list of the things we now watch out for, because we've learned the hard way what happens when we don't.
The film is trying to say everything
This is the big one. A brand film gets commissioned and suddenly every department wants a seat. Sustainability wants a mention. HR wants the people. Sales wants the product range. The CEO wants the vision. Somebody in the room wants the new office in there because it cost a lot of money.
Each request is reasonable on its own. Together they produce a film that's a sort of verbal brochure, ninety seconds of things the company would like you to know, with no single idea holding it together.
The fix is boring but it works. Before we write a word of script, we ask the client to finish one sentence: "After watching this, I want people to believe that..." If the answer has the word "and" in it more than once, we keep talking. A good brand film earns one belief. Maybe two. Everything else can go into the cut-downs, the website, the annual report.
Nobody decided who it's for
"Everyone" is not an audience. We hear it more than you'd expect. The film is for investors, and customers, and potential recruits, and the local community, and staff.
Those people want very different things. An investor wants confidence and direction. A graduate engineer wants to know whether it's a decent place to work and whether they'll learn anything. A neighbour of a big site wants to know you're not going to be a nuisance. You can't speak to all of them in the same voice without sounding like you're speaking to none of them.
When we pin this down early, a lot of other decisions get easier. Who should be on camera. Whether it needs a voiceover or not. How long it should be. Where it's going to live.
The script was written for reading, not hearing
Corporate scripts often start life as a document that's been through several rounds of comments. By the time they reach us they're accurate, signed off and completely unsayable. Long sentences, three clauses deep, full of words nobody uses out loud.
We read every script aloud before it goes anywhere near a voice artist or a contributor. If we stumble, it gets cut. If it sounds like a press release, it gets rewritten. People switch off the second they sense they're being talked at, and nothing says "talked at" like a sentence that needs a breath halfway through.
Even better, where we can, we don't script the people at all. We interview them properly, give them time to warm up, and build the story from what they actually say. The best lines in our films are almost never the ones we wrote.
It's all wide shots and no faces
Big industrial and infrastructure clients have amazing places to film. We've stood in turbine halls and on the edge of huge construction sites and it is genuinely tempting to fill a film with sweeping, beautiful wides.
But scale on its own doesn't make anyone feel anything. A wide shot of a site tells you it's big. A close-up of someone's hands on a valve, or the face of an apprentice who's just been given responsibility for something real, tells you why it matters. You need both, and most failing films have too much of the first and almost none of the second.
On the shoot day this usually means spending more time than planned with fewer people. It's worth it.
Nobody planned for where it would actually be watched
A beautiful two minute film that lives on the homepage and gets shown once at a company conference is not a success, however proud everyone is of it.
We now ask about distribution right at the start. Is it going on LinkedIn? Then the first three seconds need to work with the sound off. Is it for recruitment? Then it needs a vertical version and a short version that can run as an ad. Is it going in front of investors? Then it probably needs to be shorter than you think and quieter than you think.
Planning the cut-downs before the shoot changes what we capture on the day. It's much cheaper than discovering afterwards that the film you've got can't be chopped into anything useful.
The approval process sanded it down
This one is delicate, because sign-off matters and we're not suggesting anyone skip it. But we've all seen a film go through five rounds of feedback and come out the other end with every interesting edge removed. The joke someone liked has gone. The slightly unusual opening has been swapped for a logo. The honest line from the site manager has been replaced with something safer.
What helps is agreeing who the final decision maker is, early, and getting them into the room for the treatment rather than only the final cut. If they've bought into the idea at the start, they tend to defend it at the end.
What a film that works tends to have
Looking back at the projects we're proudest of, the pattern is fairly simple:
- One clear thing it wants the viewer to believe
- A specific audience in mind, and a place it's going to be seen
- Real people speaking in their own words
- Enough close, human moments to balance the scale
- A version for every channel, planned before the shoot
- Somebody senior who actually likes the idea and will stick up for it
None of that is about kit or budget. Most of it is decided before anybody picks up a camera, which is exactly why we spend so much time on the brief. If you're about to commission a brand film, it's worth having that conversation before you've settled on what it should look like. We're always happy to have it with you.