How to brief an AI video so the first cut is usable
A good AI video brief is short but specific. Five things decide whether the first version lands or wastes a round: outcome, reference, message, format and the one non-negotiable.
The speed of AI production moves the bottleneck. When a first cut arrives in 24 to 48 hours, the slow part is no longer the making, it is the brief. A vague brief buys you a fast video of the wrong thing. A sharp one gets you a usable first cut and turns the revision round into polish instead of rescue. Five things do most of the work.
1. State the outcome, not the shot list
Tell us what the video is for before you tell us what is in it. “Drive trial sign-ups from Instagram” and “explain the returns policy so support tickets drop” are different videos even with the same product on screen. When we know the job, every later choice, length, pacing, the call to action, has an answer. When we only get a shot list, we are guessing at the point.
2. Give one reference, and say what you like about it
One link beats a paragraph of adjectives. A video you wish yours felt like, and a single line on why: the pace, the tone, the colour, the way it opens. “Like this, but calmer” carries more than “modern, premium, dynamic,” three words that mean something different to everyone in the room. Avoid stacking five references; that averages into mush.
3. Write the one message a viewer must leave with
If the viewer forgets everything but one sentence, what is it? Most weak briefs try to say four things and land none. Pick the one. The rest can live in the caption, the landing page, the next video in the sequence. A video that makes a single point clearly beats one that lists features nobody retains.
4. Name the format and where it runs
A 9:16 cut for a feed and a 16:9 cut for a site behave differently in the first second, the framing, the subtitle logic. Tell us the aspect ratio, the rough length, and the platform. If you need the master to become many cuts later, say so now; we build the master so those cuts fall out of it cleanly instead of re-rendering each one.
5. Flag the one non-negotiable
Every brand has a thing that must be exact: the logo lockup, the product colour, a claim you can and cannot make, a word you never use. One or two of these, stated plainly, prevents the most expensive kind of revision, the one where the video is good but unusable. Save the rest of the brand book for later; the first cut needs the hard constraints, not all of them.
What you do not need to write
You do not need a scene-by-scene script, a storyboard, or production language. That is our job, and over-specifying it usually makes the video worse, because it locks choices before anyone has seen a frame. The brief sets the destination. Leave the route to the people who drive it every day.
The shortcut
If writing even this feels like work, send the five answers as five lines and a link. That is enough to price the project and start. We would rather have five sharp sentences than five pages, and so would your first cut.
Ready to try it? Send the brief and we come back with a price within a day.