A good brief for an animated explainer video needs five things: who it is for, what you want them to do afterwards, roughly how long it should be, when you need it, and where it is going to live. That is genuinely it. The script, the style, the storyboard and the voice are what you are paying a studio to work out — and handing those over half-finished usually costs you more time than leaving them alone.
What a brief is actually for
Most briefs we receive are too long and not specific enough. They arrive as a twelve-page document describing the company in detail, and somewhere on page nine there is a sentence about what the video is supposed to achieve. That sentence is the brief. The rest is background.
A brief is not a specification. Its job is to tell the studio what success looks like, so that every decision made afterwards — which scenes to keep, what to cut when the script runs long, whether a moment should be funny or plain — has something to be measured against. If we know the video exists to get finance directors to book a demo, we can make a hundred small choices correctly without asking you about any of them.
Without that, we ask you about all hundred. That is where projects lose their weeks.
The five things we genuinely need
1. Who is watching. Not "our customers". A job title, a moment, a mood. "Operations managers at mid-sized logistics firms, watching on a laptop during a procurement review, sceptical because they have been sold software before." That single sentence changes the script, the pace, the voice and the colour palette.
2. What you want them to do next. Book a demo, request pricing, understand a policy change, stop calling support about one particular thing. One action. If there are three, the video will do none of them well, and it is better to find that out in the brief than in round four of amends.
3. Roughly how long. You do not need to be precise. "Around ninety seconds" is enough. As a rule of thumb, voiceover runs at roughly 140 to 150 words a minute, so ninety seconds is about 220 words — which is less than you think, and is the single most useful number in this whole article. Most of the videos we make land under two minutes.
4. When you need it. A real date, and what it is tied to. "Before the trade show on the 14th" is far more useful than "ASAP", because it tells us what can flex and what cannot. Our animated explainer videos typically run four to six weeks end to end; app and platform demos are usually two to four.
5. Where it will live. A website hero, a conference screen, LinkedIn, a sales rep's laptop, all five. This decides aspect ratios, whether it has to work with the sound off, how much text sits on screen and how hard the first three seconds have to work. It is the thing most often left out and the one that causes the most rework.
What you don't need to have worked out
Plenty of people delay sending a brief for weeks because they think they need more of it finished. You do not need any of the following, and in several cases you are better off without them.
- A script. Unless you write for a living, a script written in-house usually needs rewriting, and everyone finds that awkward. Send the three things the video must say instead.
- A storyboard. Storyboarding is a craft decision that depends on the script, and the script depends on the brief.
- A visual style. Two or three videos you like — including competitors' — tell us more in thirty seconds than a paragraph describing a style ever will. Say what you like about each one, because "this one" without "because the pacing is calm" is easy to misread.
- Brand guidelines, if you don't have them. A logo file and a website is plenty to work from.
- The exact length. See above. We will tell you what your content actually needs.
If you are still deciding whether video is even the right format for what you have got, that is a legitimate earlier question — we have written separately about choosing between an infographic and an explainer video, and it is worth settling before you brief anyone.
What quietly adds weeks to a project
Almost no animation project is late because the animation took longer than expected. They are late for three reasons, and all three are decided before a single frame is made.
Unnamed approvers. The most expensive sentence in this business is "I just need to run it past someone." If a director, a compliance team or a founder gets a say, they need to see the script — not the finished animation. Changing a line in a script takes a minute. Changing it once it is animated, voiced and timed to music can take a day.
Feedback arriving in pieces. Four separate emails over five days, occasionally contradicting each other, is the most common way a two-day amend becomes a two-week one. One consolidated set of notes per round, from one person, is worth more than any deadline you can set.
Content that doesn't exist yet. If the video needs real screens from a product that is still being built, or a statistic nobody has verified, the project stops at that point regardless of everything else. Flag it in the brief and we will build around it rather than into it.
What actually changes the price
Our pricing is per minute of finished video — animated explainers start at £950 a minute and app and platform demos at £700, all-inclusive. So the honest answer is that length is the main lever, and length comes from your script.
The things people expect to be expensive often are not. Unlimited amendments are included, so revisions do not add cost. The things that genuinely move the number are the ones that add minutes: covering four use cases instead of one, listing every feature rather than the three that matter, or opening with ninety seconds of company history before reaching the point.
Cutting a video from three minutes to ninety seconds usually makes it both cheaper and better. That is not a sales line — it is the most common piece of advice we give, and it is the one people are most relieved to hear.
A brief you could send this afternoon
Copy this, fill in the six lines, and send it. It is more useful than most twelve-page documents, and it takes about ten minutes.
- Audience: who is watching, where, and what they already think.
- Action: the one thing they should do afterwards.
- Message: the three things the video must say. Ranked.
- Length and deadline: approximate length, real date, and what the date is tied to.
- Where it lives: every place it will be used, including the ones with the sound off.
- References: two or three videos you like, and one line each on why.
Add anything genuinely fixed — a brand palette, a product name, a regulatory line that has to appear verbatim — and leave the rest to the studio. If you would rather see what that produces before writing anything, our work is the fastest way to judge it.