After 15 years and hundreds of productions, I’ve noticed the same thing separates the films people share from the ones that get filed away and forgotten.
It’s not the budget. It’s not the gear. It’s not even the production quality — though all of those things matter.
It’s whether the film made you feel something.
The Brief Is Never the Story
Clients come to me with a brief. They know what they want to communicate — their mission, their product, their differentiator. That’s necessary information. But the brief is almost never where the story lives.
The story lives in the moment a founder describes the problem they were solving at 2am when they couldn’t sleep. It lives in the employee who’s been with the company for 11 years and gets emotional when they talk about why. It lives in the customer who didn’t expect the product to change anything, and then it did.
My job in pre-production — before a camera ever rolls — is to find that thread. The human element that turns a company’s messaging into something a stranger on the internet will watch to the end and then send to their friend.
“The brief tells you what to communicate. The story tells you how to make someone care.”
Emotion Is the Mechanism
People make decisions emotionally and justify them rationally. This is true for B2C and B2B alike. A VP of Marketing watching your brand film isn’t immune to feeling something — they’re a person. If your film makes them feel something genuine, they’ll figure out a justification to work with you.
The mistake I see most often is brands leading with information instead of emotion. The film opens with a title card explaining what the company does. Then a voiceover lists the features. Then a spokesperson explains the benefits. By the time there’s anything that might connect emotionally, the viewer has already scrolled past.
Flip it. Lead with a moment. Lead with a question. Lead with something that makes the viewer lean forward. Then earn the right to deliver your message.
The Look Matters More Than People Admit
Shallow depth of field isn’t a style choice — it’s a signal. When something is shot on cinema-grade glass with intentional color grading and a thought-out lighting scheme, viewers register it as premium even if they can’t articulate why. The look creates the frame for everything else.
This is why we shoot on cameras like the Red Dragon and the Sony Burano, with Cooke primes and a full Arri lighting package. Not to impress other cinematographers. Because the image quality communicates something about your brand before a single word is spoken.
The camera package matters — not for spec sheets, but for what it communicates about your brand before a word is spoken.
Structure It Like a Story, Not a Presentation
The best brand films follow a narrative arc — even if they’re only 90 seconds long. There’s a world before. There’s a tension or a question. There’s a turning point. There’s a world after.
Even a :60 product spot can have this structure if you build it right. The viewer needs to be taken somewhere. They need to feel like something happened. A list of product features presented over B-roll doesn’t do that. A story does.
The Question I Ask Every Client
In every pre-production meeting, I ask one question: What do you want someone to feel 30 seconds after they finish watching this?
Not what you want them to know. Not what you want them to do. What you want them to feel.
When a client can answer that specifically — “I want them to feel like they’ve been missing out,” or “I want them to feel proud they chose us,” or “I want them to feel seen” — we have a north star for every creative decision that follows.
When they can’t answer it, we spend as much time as it takes getting there. Because everything else is in service of that answer.
That’s what makes a great brand film. Not the budget. The intention behind every frame.
Ready to work together?
“Ready to build a brand film that actually moves people? Let’s start with that question.”
Start the Conversation