Brand Film for a Launch That Has a Distribution Plan

The first question is where it runs. If the honest answer is the homepage header and a loop on a trade stand, the recommendation is a ninety-second film at a fraction of this budget, and that recommendation arrives before any invoice exists. A film at this level earns its cost through distribution: a seeded paid budget, an embargoed press date, a keynote, a funding announcement, a launch window other departments are already building against. Without one of those, what gets commissioned is a carefully made header image. What the engagement covers: A positioning conversation with whoever actually owns the decision. A written treatment that commits to one point of view rather than presenting three safe ones for a committee to average. Casting, locations, shoot, edit, grade, sound design, and an original or licensed score. Two to four minutes as the principal cut, with shorter cuts derived from a plan agreed at storyboard stage, because a hero film retro-fitted into a thirty-second ad afterwards produces neither a good film nor a good ad. Decisions taken deliberately: Capture and grade in Rec.709, through an ACES pipeline where the material justifies the overhead. For studio work, engine capture through Unreal's Movie Render Queue from a build stripped of HUD and debug output, cut alongside practical footage on a rhythm decided in the edit rather than alternated for its own sake. For developers, the uncomfortable arithmetic that a building photographed before landscaping finishes needs a CG extension, and that decision belongs in the treatment budget rather than being discovered in the grade. Drone work through a licensed operator holding the paperwork for the territory, Part 107 in the United States or the relevant open-category authorisation across the EU, and nothing planned over people without it. Rights and music: Talent, music and location rights are bought for the term and territory the distribution plan actually needs, quoted line by line, with the price of extending them quoted at the same moment. A two-year worldwide all-media buyout costs what it costs. Finding out in month fourteen that a face is cleared for one country costs considerably more, and always at the point where the film has started working. What you receive beyond the film: The principal cut, the shorter cuts planned from the outset, a stills set from the shoot at usable resolution, the graded masters and the project files. Subtitles in the languages the launch runs in, built as data rather than burned pixels. Not included: Media planning and buying. Press and analyst relations. Event production and stage content. Customer testimonial and case study films, which run on a different rhythm and are better made by people who make only those. Endless treatment rounds: there are two, and if the second is not close, the brief and this practice are mismatched, the engagement ends there with the treatment fee retained, and nobody has wasted a shoot finding out. Who should not book this: Anyone commissioning a film because a competitor released one. Anyone who needs the founder in every scene for reasons of internal politics; that film can be made, but not here. Anyone whose approval process ends with more than three people holding an equal veto. The film that survives that room is the one nobody objected to, and a film nobody objected to is not worth this budget to anybody, including the person who signed it off.