XO3D Studio · Thinking
The Brief We Wish We Got.
What separates the briefs that produce great work from the briefs that produce adequate work — and what the best ones have in common that has nothing to do with budget.
We have been given briefs that were one sentence long and produced some of the best work we've made. We have been given briefs that ran to twelve pages and produced some of the most protracted, revision-heavy, expensive-to-produce work in our history. The length of a brief has very little to do with its quality.
After reading hundreds of briefs, I have a fairly clear sense of what makes one good. It is rarely what clients think it is.
What makes a brief good
The four things that change everything.
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A single sentence about how it should feel
Not what it should look like. How it should feel. "We want this to feel like the product is already a design classic" is more useful than three paragraphs of visual references. "We want investors to feel the weight of the engineering before they understand what the product does" is better than a twelve-item deliverables list. The feeling is the target. Everything else is the path to it.
When a brief contains a clear emotional target, our Creative Director can test every subsequent decision against it. Does this camera angle serve that feeling? Does this material choice deepen it? Does this edit rhythm support it? A brief without an emotional target turns every creative decision into a guessing game about what the client will approve.
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One example of work you admire and why
Not a mood board of fifty images — that is visual averaging, and visual averaging produces mediocre creative direction. One example of work that you think is doing something worth doing, with one sentence explaining what it is you think it is doing. "The Sony product films where you forget you're looking at CGI and just want the product" is more useful than forty Pinterest screenshots. The specificity of one informed choice outweighs the breadth of many uninformed ones.
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An honest statement about what success looks like
Not "high quality output." What specific response are you trying to produce in the specific person who will see this? "We need investors to believe this product exists and is viable before we've shipped a unit" is a success criterion we can design toward. "We want consumers to prefer this over the Samsung equivalent when shown both in a social ad" is a success criterion we can design toward. "We need imagery that reflects our premium positioning" is a success criterion we cannot design toward because it contains no information about what premium means to this brand, for this product, in this market.
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Permission to push back
The best briefs we have received include an explicit or implicit signal that the client wants the best work, not the most literal interpretation of the brief. When a brief says "we've briefed you because of how you approached the Petalite project — we want that kind of thinking applied here," it gives us permission to say "we've read your brief and we think the approach you've outlined won't produce what you're trying to achieve — here's what we'd do instead." That conversation, before a frame is rendered, is worth more to the final output than any amount of revision rounds after delivery.
The brief we actually get most often
And how we handle it.
The brief we receive most often is this: a list of deliverables, a deadline, a reference to the brand guidelines, and an absence of any of the four things above. No emotional target. No admired reference. No success criterion. No permission to question the approach.
This is not a bad brief because the client doesn't care about the work — it is a bad brief because the client doesn't know that these four things are what turns a production job into a creative partnership. They have been trained by years of briefing suppliers who asked for file formats and dimensions rather than feelings and targets.
Our response is to ask. We ask for the one sentence about feeling before we quote. We ask for the one reference they admire. We ask what success looks like for the specific viewer. We ask whether they want us to push back if we think the brief could produce better work a different way. Three of four clients respond with answers that change the brief completely. One in four is frustrated by the questions and wants a quote for what they asked for. We serve both — but the former produces the work we're most proud of.
The brief we wish we got
For what it is worth — and in the spirit of full transparency.
For what it is worth — and in the spirit of full transparency — this is the brief we wish we received more often:
"We have a product that we believe in. We want to commission a film that makes other people believe in it too — not by explaining its features, but by making them feel what the product is worth before they understand why it's worth it. We've seen what you did with Petalite and Sony. We want that quality of thinking applied here. We trust your creative direction. Tell us what you'd do with our product."
We receive something close to this brief about four times a year. The work that comes from it is the work this studio exists to make.
Questions
Briefing questions we hear most.
Should I share a budget range in the brief?
How detailed should the deliverables list be?
Start the conversation
Want to write a brief like that?
Read our briefing guide. Or skip it and just tell us about the product and what you want people to feel when they see the imagery. We'll take it from there.