How to Brief an Animation Studio (With a Copy-Paste Template)

We have received briefs that were a single WhatsApp line (“need 1 min video for launch, urgent”) and briefs that were forty-page decks. The best ones are about a page. They answer nine questions.

The nine questions

1. What should happen after someone watches this?

Not “raise awareness”. Something a viewer can do: book a demo, download the app, walk into the showroom, understand a procedure well enough to consent to it. Every creative decision — length, tone, ending — is downstream of this.

2. Who is watching, and what do they already believe?

“Everyone” is not an audience. A film for CFOs evaluating a SaaS tool and a film for their teams who will use it daily are different films. Tell us what the audience currently thinks about the category, and what you need them to think instead.

3. Where will it play?

Platform decides format, length and whether sound can be assumed. List every placement: hero on the website, paid social (which platforms, which ratios), sales deck, trade-show screen, in-app. It is far cheaper to plan cut-downs in the animatic than to crop them afterwards.

4. What is the one thing it must say?

If the viewer remembers a single sentence, what is it? Everything else is supporting cast. Briefs with three “key messages” usually produce films with none.

5. What does it need to show?

The product, a UI, a process, a place, a character? This is what decides 2D versus 3D more than anything else (we wrote about that here). Attach whatever exists: CAD files, screenshots, packaging dielines, floor plans, photography.

6. What should it feel like — and what should it not?

References are the most useful thing in a brief. Three links to films you admire, with a sentence each on why — the pacing, the colour, the humour — and, just as valuable, one or two you dislike. “Not cartoonish” and “not corporate” mean different things to different people; a reference removes the ambiguity.

7. What are the constraints?

Brand guidelines. Mandatory legal text or disclaimers. Languages (Hindi, English, both, regional). Accessibility requirements such as captions. Anything that must appear, and anything that must not.

8. When is it needed, and what is driving that date?

A launch, a campaign flight, a trade show, a board meeting? Knowing what the deadline is for lets a studio propose sensible trade-offs if the timeline is tight — a shorter film delivered on time beats a longer one delivered late.

9. What is the budget range?

Clients sometimes hide the budget to avoid being “charged up to it”. In practice, it has the opposite effect: without a range, a studio either quotes high to cover unknowns or proposes something you cannot afford and the process restarts. A range lets us propose the best film that fits inside it.

What to leave out

• A script. Unless you have a writer, share the message and let the studio script it — you will approve every line anyway.
• A shot list. Same reason. Tell us what must be shown, not how.
• Competitors' films as “do exactly this”. As references, yes. As a template, it usually produces a worse version of someone else's idea.

The template

What happens next

With a brief like this, a studio should be able to come back within a few days with a recommended approach, a fixed quote, a milestone schedule and a delivery date. If they come back with questions instead, that is a good sign — it means they read it. If you'd like to try it on us, send the brief here.