TL;DR
Most case study video briefs ask clients to commit to numbers nobody controls. Ours doesn’t. Below is a free case study video brief template built around the questions that actually decide whether a shoot goes well, plus some notes on how to use it. No email required.
The problem with most briefs
I’ve been sent a lot of briefs over the years. The polished ones tend to arrive from marketing teams at bigger companies, and they nearly always contain a row that says something like: KPI target, 25% uplift in landing page conversion by end of quarter.
I never know what to do with that row.
Not because it’s unreasonable to want results. It’s just not something a film can promise. I can control how the interview is lit, whether the interviewee relaxes enough to say something true rather than something rehearsed, how the edit paces the story. Whether the finished film converts viewers at 2% or 1.2% depends on the landing page, the traffic, the offer, the price, the season, and a dozen other things that have nothing to do with me. When a brief asks the production company to sign up to a conversion target, everyone in the room quietly knows it’s theatre. The number gets written down, the video gets made, and nobody ever mentions the number again.
So when we built our own case study video brief template, we left that row out. What’s left is everything that has actually made a difference on the shoots we’ve done: who’s being interviewed and what they won’t talk about, what can’t be shown on camera, who signs off, when it’s needed, what the story actually is.
You can download it further down. It’s free.
What a brief is actually for
Three groups of people have to end up on the same page before filming starts. The client team who commissioned it. The interviewee, who is often a different person entirely, sometimes at a different company, sometimes mildly reluctant. And the crew.
When those three groups share the same understanding of the film, shoots are calm. When they don’t, you find out at the worst possible moment.
The template opens with a short project details block (name, owner, contact) and then runs to ten sections. None of it is clever. It’s just the questions that keep coming up.
The ten sections
1. Goal and success. Instead of KPIs, we ask what would make this video feel worthwhile six to twelve months on. Clients can answer that honestly. “We want something we’re proud to send to prospects” is a real answer. So is “the sales team needs a way to explain what we do that isn’t a forty-slide deck”. Both have shaped films we’ve made.
2. Audience and message. Who’s watching, and what should they take away. Written in the audience’s language, not marketing language. If it’s for compliance officers at mid-sized banks, say that.
3. Story and proof. The one-sentence version of the story, the key beats, and whatever evidence the client is comfortable putting on record. This is what separates a case study from a testimonial. A testimonial is an opinion. A case study is a story. Something happened, something changed.
4. Interviewees. Who, when, and crucially: what’s off-limits. Every organisation has topics that are commercially or personally sensitive. Finding out in pre-production costs nothing. Finding out in the edit costs a re-shoot.
5. Locations and access. Where, and what can’t be shown. Screens with customer data. Security procedures. The room that turns out to be booked.
6. Deliverables. Lengths, cut-downs, aspect ratios, captions, graphics. Boring, and the section where changing your mind later costs actual money, so worth doing properly the first time.
7. Distribution. Where the film will live and how the team will use it. Not so we can promise numbers, but so we cut it right. A film for a conference screen breathes differently than a film for a LinkedIn feed.
8. Timeline and approvals. Dates, and who signs off at each stage. Unclear approval chains are the single most common reason projects stall. Not budget. Not creative disagreement. Approvals.
9. Budget and constraints. A range is fine. “We have some budget” isn’t, because it forces us to guess, and we’ll either guess too big or too small.
10. Assets to supply. Brand kit, system access, previous films, references. Unglamorous. Saves two weeks.
Download the template
The case study video brief template is an Excel file with three tabs: the brief itself (with dropdowns and a completion counter), the options behind the dropdowns, and a plain-text version you can paste into a doc or Notion if spreadsheets aren’t your thing.
Download the case study video brief template
No email gate. If you find it useful, share the URL rather than the file so people get the current version.
A few questions we get asked
Is this only for corporate clients?
No. Charities, universities, funds, professional services. The sections are the same. The guidance leans corporate because that’s most of our work.
Do we have to fill in everything?
No. Required fields are marked, there are 23 of them out of 49, and the counter at the top tells you where you stand. A half-finished brief is still a useful brief.
We already have a template we like.
Then use it. We published this one because most of the templates in circulation are built around promises we don’t think a production company should make. If yours is honest and your team knows it, there’s no reason to switch.
Can you help us write the brief?
Yes, often we do. Some clients fill it in before the first call. Others prefer to go through it together in a working session. Either works.
About Headroom Films
Headroom Films is a video production company in London. We make case study videos, event films and corporate video for organisations that want the work done properly without the marketing theatre around it. Our pricing is on the website. If the template is useful, good. That is what it is for.
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