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Logo briefs are remarkably stable. What people want from a mark now is close to what they wanted a decade ago. Video briefs are not stable at all, and the shape of what arrives on the motion desk has moved twice in two years.
Vertical stopped being an afterthought
Two years ago a vertical cut was something you asked for at the end, once the real edit was finished, and it was produced by cropping. Now a substantial share of briefs specify vertical as the primary format and the horizontal cut as the derivative. That is a different edit, not a different export: framing, pacing and where you can put text all change, and captions become part of the composition rather than an accessibility layer added afterwards.
Thumbnails became a design job with a test attached
A thumbnail used to be a still with a headline on it. Now clients arrive expecting three variants designed for comparison, and increasingly with data from the last set: this face angle held, that colour did not, text over five words never wins. It is the only part of the creative process most clients have real numbers for, and it makes for unusually good briefs.
Sound turned into a deliverable
- Voice-over is asked for by name rather than assumed to be the client reading a script badly into a phone.
- Noise cleanup on interview footage is now routine, and it is what rescues a shoot that happened in a real room.
- Music licensing questions arrive before the edit rather than after a strike notice, which is progress.
- Sound design on a four-second logo sting: a mark now often needs an audio signature, not just a moving one.
Where the money goes now
| Two years ago | Most of the budget in the edit, a little in graphics, sound as an afterthought. |
|---|---|
| Now | Edit still leads, but graphics and thumbnails take a real share, and sound is a line item rather than a favour. |
| What got cheaper | Transcription, subtitle timing, rough assembly and noise removal. The tooling genuinely improved and the prices moved with it. |
| What did not | Deciding what to cut. The first ten seconds of a video is still the most expensive ten seconds to get right. |
What we tell people to send
- 1The raw footage, not a pre-cut version. A rough cut removes options and rarely saves time.
- 2Where it is being published, and in what aspect ratio, before the edit starts.
- 3Two videos you think work, and one you think does not, with a sentence on each.
- 4The logo files. A moving mark drawn from a screenshot of a static one starts a step behind.
Got a project this applies to?
Send two lines about the business and you get a plan, a timeline and one fixed price. If the honest answer is that you do not need us for it, we will say that instead.