How to brief an AI studio (the exact brief we send)

By bax · 13 October 2026 · 7 min read

A wooden clipboard holding a blank white sheet pinned at the top with a torn strip of electric-blue tape, lying beside a worn black clapperboard on warm grey paper.

Short answer

A good brief for an AI studio fits on one page and answers ten things: objective, audience, the single message, formats and ratios, references with a reason for each, product truths, non-negotiables, don'ts, deadline and who approves. Leave out the mood words and the prompt ideas. The studio turns the brief into prompts, not the other way round.

The best brief we ever received was about 240 words long and came with a shoebox. Inside the box: the product, a competitor's product, a printout of one frame from a 1970s commercial, and a sticky note that said "never show the lid off". We sent look frames the next morning and the client approved them before lunch.

The worst brief was eleven pages, had a mood board of forty images, and did not mention which product we were selling until page seven. We spent two of nine days asking questions the brief should have answered.

Both clients were smart. The difference was that the first knew what a studio needs and the second gave us what an agency pitch needs. Those are different documents. Here is ours.

What should an AI video brief include?

An AI video brief should include ten things: the objective, the audience, the single message, the formats and ratios, references with a reason for each, product truths, non-negotiables, don'ts, the deadline and who approves. If it has those, it fits on one page. If it is longer than two, something in it is a prompt idea or a mood word, and those belong to the studio, not the brief.

The order matters less than the completeness. We have taken briefs as bullet points in an email, as a shared document, and once as voice notes transcribed by an assistant. All fine. What slows a project is a missing section, not a missing template.

The difference between briefing an AI studio and briefing a traditional shoot is small but real. On a real set the product is in the room, so nobody has to describe it. On ours, the model has never seen your product. Every true fact you give us about it is one fewer thing it will invent.

The brief we send to every client

Copy this. Answer each line in one to three sentences. If a line does not apply, write "n/a" rather than deleting it, so we know you considered it.

Objective. What should change after someone sees this? Sales of one product, sign-ups, awareness in a new market, retargeting an existing audience. One objective per brief.
Audience. Who is watching, where, and in what mood? "Women 28 to 40 on Reels at 22:00" is useful. "Everyone" is not.
Single message. The one sentence a viewer should be able to repeat afterwards. If you have three, we are making three videos.
Formats, placements, ratios. Platform, length, 9:16 / 1:1 / 16:9, sound on or off, captions needed, any platform specs we should know about.
References, with a why. Three to six links or frames. Next to each one, what you like about it: the pace, the light, the way the product is held. "Like this but ours" is not a why.
Product truths. Exact dimensions, colours as values, materials, finishes, how the cap opens, what the texture does, what the product must never do. Attach the real artwork for any label or logo.
Non-negotiables. Things that must appear: logo placement, a claim, a legal line, a specific shade, a specific gesture.
Don'ts. Things that must never appear: competitor colours, certain words, the lid off, a hand that reads as the wrong age, a setting that reads as a different price point.
Deadline and milestones. When you need the final files, and when you can realistically review. Reviews that slip move delivery day for day.
Approvals. Who signs off, in what order, and who has the last word when two people disagree. One name is ideal. Two is workable. A committee is a schedule risk.

Why do references need a "why"?

References need a reason attached because a single frame carries fifty decisions and you only mean three of them. If you send a perfume ad and say "like this", we do not know whether you mean the slow push-in, the golden backlight, the hand model, the music or the typography. Tell us the three, and we will leave the other forty-seven alone.

This matters more with AI than with a crew. A crew will ask you on set. A model will absorb the whole reference, including the parts you did not want, and hand them back to you across three hundred takes.

A plain matte ceramic bottle standing on warm grey paper beside a folded cloth tape measure and one electric-blue square sticky note. — Product truths start with a tape measure. The sticky note is for the thing the model will otherwise get wrong.

A reference that works: "0:04 to 0:09 of this clip, for the pace of the cut. Ignore the colour." A reference that does not: a board of forty images with no notes. We will still use it, but we will spend half a day guessing which of the forty you meant, and we will guess wrong on at least ten.

Three to six references is the right number. Fewer and we are under-briefed. More and they start contradicting each other, so we have to pick, which means we are making a decision that should have been yours.

What are product truths, and why do they matter more for AI?

Product truths are the facts about your product that are not negotiable and that a model cannot know: size, proportion, colour, material, finish, how it opens, what it does when it is used. They matter more for AI because on a real shoot the product is in frame and tells the truth itself. In generation, anything you do not specify is invented, and an invented product looks like a product but not like yours.

The list we ask for on every product job:

Dimensions, and one object for scale. Fits in a palm. The height of a wine bottle.
Colours as values, not names. "Sage" is forty colours.
Finish: matte, satin, gloss, frosted, brushed. Light behaves differently on each, and the model will pick the one that photographs best, which is rarely yours.
Label and logo artwork as vector or high-resolution files. We composite real type over generated product. We never ship generated type.
Behaviour: what happens when it is squeezed, poured, opened, worn. Whether the liquid is clear or opaque. Whether the cream holds a shape.
What is never shown: the base, the barcode, the lid off, the product on its side.

The shoebox client did all of this with a sticky note and a box. You can do it in six lines.

What should you leave out of the brief?

Leave out the mood words, the prompt ideas, the full brand book and the list of every platform you might one day use. Mood words such as "premium", "authentic" and "bold" mean something different to every reader, so they cost a round of look frames to decode. Prompt ideas are our job, and a brief that arrives with them usually arrives with the wrong ones.

Tell us what must be true and what must never happen. We will handle what it looks like.

Specifically:

The forty-page brand book. Send it, but do not brief from it. Pull out the three rules that matter for this piece and put them under non-negotiables.
Prompts. "A cinematic shot of..." is not a brief, it is a guess at a method. Brief the outcome.
Every format you might want. Brief the two or three you will actually publish. Extra ratios are cheap to add at the end and expensive to carry through every review.
Competitor bashing. Tell us who the competitor is so we avoid their colours. Do not ask us to make them look bad. It never reads well and it starts a legal conversation you do not want.
Internal history. Why the last agency was let go is useful context on a call. It is not a section in the brief.

How long should the brief be?

One page. The useful test is whether a stranger could read it in four minutes and then describe the finished video back to you in two sentences. If they cannot, the brief is missing a section. If it takes them ten minutes, it has too many.

Three blank white index cards laid in a row on warm grey paper with a single electric-blue pencil resting across the middle one. — Objective, message, audience. If those three cards do not agree, the rest of the brief will not either.

We spend the first call, fifteen minutes, reading the brief back to you. If you hear your own project in it, we start. If you hear something else, we fix the brief before anybody generates a frame. A sentence changed on day one costs nothing. The same sentence changed on day six costs a day.

What happens after you send it

After the brief arrives we turn it into a shot list and a reference pack, and send back look frames within a day or two. Look frames are stills, not video, and they are the cheapest moment in the project to change your mind. Everything after that is generation, selects, fixes and the cut, which I have described in what an AI video studio actually does all day.

If you want to see how a brief like this one turns into finished files, here is a typical project laid out over nine days. And if you would rather see what the end of that process looks like before you write anything, the work is on the front page.

Frequently asked

How long should an AI video brief be?

One page. Ten short sections: objective, audience, single message, formats and ratios, references with a reason, product truths, non-negotiables, don'ts, deadline and approvals. If it runs past two pages it usually contains mood words or prompt ideas that belong to the studio, not the brief.

Should I write prompts in my brief?

No. Brief the outcome, not the method. Prompts are the studio's job, and a brief that arrives with prompts usually arrives with the wrong ones. Tell the studio what must be true and what must never appear, and let them decide how to get there.

What does an AI studio need to know about my product?

Dimensions, colours as values rather than names, finish, how it opens and behaves in use, the label artwork as a file, and anything that must never be shown. The model has never seen your product; every fact you give is one fewer thing it will invent.

Got a product and a deadline? Fifteen minutes is usually enough to tell you whether AI is the right way to make it, and what it would cost.

Book a call or look at the work