A brand film when you do not have a studio budget

Search for a brand film and you will find the same thing everywhere: a founder walking through a workspace, a voice saying something about passion, and a number that starts at five figures. It is also the wrong product for almost every business with a few hundred pounds rather than a few tens of thousands.

The expensive version is expensive mostly for reasons you do not need. What follows is about asking for the smaller, sharper thing, and where your own time genuinely replaces somebody else's invoice.

What a small business actually needs from a film

Strip the phrase down and a brand film is a film about what your company is, and what somebody should take from it. Nothing in that definition requires length, a crew or a location. What it requires is a decision.

So decide three things before you talk to anybody. One job, one audience, one place to put it.

• One job. The film explains one thing: what you do, why a price is what it is, or what happens after somebody gets in touch. A film with two jobs does neither of them.
• One audience. A homeowner and a procurement manager need different sentences and a different pace. Read your script as if only the one you chose were in the room.
• One place to put it. A website block, a social feed, a trade fair screen or a pitch. The place decides the shape, the length and how much text can appear on screen.

If you cannot answer all three, you do not have a brief yet, and the budget will be spent finding out what it was. That discovery is the most expensive part of filmmaking, and it is free to do at your kitchen table.

Why "brand film" usually means something too grand

The word brand pulls a certain kind of production behind it. Mission statements, drone shots, a slow piano, a length of two to three minutes. It also makes the budget feel justified, because brand sounds like a permanent asset rather than a piece of communication with a shelf life.

What most small businesses need is closer to an explainer: thirty to sixty seconds, one argument, watched to the end. The vocabulary matters, because it decides what gets quoted. Ask for a short brand film and you invite the grand version. Ask for a thirty-second film that does one job, and you get a number you can work with. For how a quotation is built before you ask for one, see what a film costs and where the money goes.

The other half of the problem is that look gets mixed up with message. Much of a grand quote is spent on a look: the palette, the typeface, the motion language, the moodboard approved in week two and revised in week three. On a few hundred pounds, that money is better spent on the argument, because the look is what you can supply yourself.

You can also see your own colours in motion before spending anything. Nine's free page reads your website and plays Nine's own films in your colours, with no account and no card. It makes no film of your own and it does not know your message. What it shows you is whether your colours survive animation, which is usually the first thing a studio would charge you to find out.

What you can prepare yourself, and what it saves

The cost of a small film is the decision loop, not the drawing. Every question that arrives during production is answered by somebody, and if the person making the film has to guess, you pay twice: once for the question and once for the guess.

So arrive with these in a folder. None of them takes long, and each one removes a round of email.

• The job in one sentence. Something like "this film explains what happens in the first week after a customer signs up". No adjectives.
• Your colours, written down. The exact values from your stylesheet or your guidelines, not a screenshot of your logo taken off a business card.
• Your typeface, as a file. Not the name of something similar. A film that uses a lookalike font looks slightly wrong to the only people who notice, which is you and your customers. We have written separately about your colours, your typeface, and what happens when a brand has neither.
• One paragraph of plain description. What the company does, in the words you would use on the phone. Not the website copy.
• The shapes you need. Say up front whether you need a wide version, an upright one, a square one, or all of them. That decision is nearly free at the start and a re-edit later.
• Anything you already like. Two or three films, from anywhere, with one line each on what you like about them. Cheaper than a moodboard and more accurate.

One more thing to prepare, and it is the one people skip: be honest about what you do not have. Saying "we have no brand guidelines" at the start costs nothing. Discovering it halfway through costs a revision.

What to never cut: the message and the sound

Two line items decide whether a small film works, and they get trimmed first when a quote comes in high.

The first is the message. Not the script as literature, the argument: what is claimed, in what order, and what the viewer should do next. A weak argument cannot be rescued by nicer drawings, because the drawings are illustrating the wrong thing. Fix the argument before anything is animated, and keep it fixed: one page, decided, with a name on it. A brief that is a conversation is more expensive than a brief that is a document.

The second is the sound. Sound is the invisible line in every quotation, and the first thing an audience notices when it is wrong. Modest visuals with clear sound read as professional. Beautiful visuals with hollow sound read as cheap, and viewers will call the film bad without being able to say why.

Concretely: do not let a music track be chosen by whoever is available, and do not let a voice be recorded on a laptop microphone in a room with a fridge in it. A few hundred pounds buys a clear voice and a mix that sits properly, and that money shows on screen more than the same amount spent on extra scenes.

Where you can save instead: fewer scenes, less movement, fewer decorative elements, and no bespoke illustration style invented from nothing. A film made of type and two colours is a perfectly respectable film. A film with a thin argument is not.

One film, four shapes, five places to use it

The most common way small budgets are wasted is that a single film is bought for a single place, and then vertical versions are bought again later at almost the price of the first film.

So ask for the shapes with the brief. A wide, a tall and a square version are not crops of each other when each is composed for its frame; cutting the sides off a wide frame puts the thing you were meant to look at outside the picture and runs text out of room. In Nine you reframe the finished film yourself in the chamber and save each shape as a version, at no extra cost, and one film in three shapes shows how.

With those files in hand, one film does five jobs.

1. Your website. The wide version goes where visitors currently read three paragraphs and leave.
2. Social and paid. The upright and square versions run in a feed, and the same edit can be cut shorter for an advert.
3. A trade fair. A screen on a stand runs the upright loop while you are talking to somebody else, in your colours rather than the venue's.
4. A pitch or a tender. A film keeps making your argument in the meeting you were not in.
5. A link in an email. The same film answers the question you answer on the phone every week.

If it only ever appears in one place, you have paid for five jobs and used one.

How to judge a quote

Quotes for the same film can differ by a factor of five and both be honest, because they are not quotes for the same work. So read the line items rather than the total, and ask these questions.

• What exactly is in the number? Script, voice, music, animation, sound mix, and the export formats. A quote that leaves sound out is not a cheaper quote, it is an incomplete one.
• How many revision rounds, and what happens after them? Two rounds with a clear definition of a round is better than unlimited rounds described as free.
• Who owns the film, and where can you show it? Ask about the music and the voice as well as the picture. A licence that covers a website but not a paid advert is a trap that closes later.
• What are the shapes, and are they included? The answer tells you whether they compose for each shape or crop one.
• What do you need from me, and by when? If the answer is vague, the schedule is vague, and a slow decision on your side is the most common reason a small project runs over.
• What happens to the material afterwards? The strongest answer is that the files are yours when the film is done, so a future film can be built from the same palette and type instead of starting again.
• What would you cut to hit a smaller number? A confident answer tells you the quote was built rather than guessed. A defensive one tells you the opposite.

Nine's prices are public on the pricing page. A film of your own comes with a monthly plan: the plan puts credits in your account, a film uses credits, and Nine tells you what a film costs before it starts and never takes more. The plans differ in how many films a month they hold, how long a film can be, and what comes with it, such as transparent files, graphics over your own talking-head video and extra languages. If you are weighing one careful film against three shorter ones, we have compared them in one film or three.

A few hundred pounds is enough for one short film with a clear argument and decent sound, and a few thousand is enough for a round of related films decided once. Tens of thousands buys a production with people standing around a monitor. Unless the film has to carry a national campaign, that money is better spent on distribution. Only one of those matches the business you actually run.

The short version

Write the job in one sentence, and the audience in three words. Gather your colours, your typeface and your plain description before you ask anybody for anything. See your colours on Nine's films first, because it is free and it shows you your own brand in motion. Decide the shapes at the start. Hold the message and the sound, and stay flexible about everything else, because everything else can be simplified without the film stopping working.

Then read the quote as a list of included things rather than a price, and pick the film you can honestly finish. One film doing one job beats a grand film doing several badly.