#6 Beyond the Brief: The Brief Is The Floor Not The Ceiling

Most brands come to us knowing what they need.

A hero image for the website. A product video for Amazon. A campaign visual for the fall launch. The brief is clear, the shot list is locked, and the goal is to check every box before wrap.

And we will. Every single one.

But here’s what we’ve learned after years of doing this, the shot list is just the beginning of what a single production can deliver.

Let me tell you what happened when a client brought a project to us asking for some lifestyle photography.

We jumped on a call and after a few conversations about how the content was actually going to be used social, web, email, Amazon pages, ads, stories, ect, it became clear that photography alone wasn’t going to get them where they needed to go. So we added video. And once we were adding video, we asked about formats. Where was this video going to be used? Horizontal for web? Vertical for social? Knowing the end use from the start helps us determine the best approach for the job. They said yes to both. Rather than shooting everything horizontal and cropping verticals out of that footage, we brought in a dedicated second DP running a vertical setup simultaneously. Every scene was captured with intent for every format from the start.

Here’s what that decision unlocked.

With two DPs handling video I was freed up to concentrate entirely on photography. When you’re not being pulled in six directions at once, the work shows it. We collaborated on every scene together, photography, horizontal video, vertical video, all working in concert. A talented team aligned toward the same goal has a compounding effect on everything it touches. The final deliverables weren’t just more than the client expected. They were better than any of us could have produced separately.

That’s what one production can do when you plan it right from the start.

Now let’s talk about budget because this is where a lot of brands start to freak out about the numbers.

No matter what you have to spend, the more honest you are about it from the start, the faster we can get to actual outcomes. We’re not here to judge the number. We’re here to help you pull the right levers to make it work. More images means more post-production. Highly crafted specific scenes means more art department and production needs. Multiple formats means additional crew. Every decision affects the scope and our job is to help you sequence those choices so the budget you have produces the maximum output you need. One other aspect is working with the client to see hidden opportunities. Sometimes we need to take advantage of the current production to capture footage that would otherwise be too expensive or unrealistic to recreate at a later time. Although this may mean an increase to the budget, more times than not, they are glad we went the extra mile to make it happen.

No two productions are the same because the needs are always changing.

And then there’s the stuff that gets overlooked a lot of the time.

BTS. Behind the scenes. The thing brands consistently underestimate and audiences consistently love.

People outside this industry, and honestly plenty inside it too, love to see how the sausage is made. The lights, the crew, the cameras, the moment where a somewhat ordinary scene transforms into something extraordinary through the eye of a talented photographer or DP. It opens a window into the brand that most people would never have access to otherwise. And when there’s a wall of fire or a shower of sparks involved, yeah people are going to watch that.

But it goes beyond BTS. The five second clip that wasn’t on the shot list. The image that barely shows the product but completely captures the feeling of the brand. The outtake that ended up being the most honest moment of the whole day.

Some of the best content we’ve ever delivered wasn’t in the brief.

It was in the spaces between the shot list, the moments we captured because we were paying attention, because we understood the brand well enough to recognize when something real was happening, and just because we got the “shot” doesn’t mean there’s still a part of the story waiting to be captured.

One shoot. Maximum output. And sometimes the best stuff is the thing nobody thought to ask for.