An explainer video brief should tell the production team what the viewer needs to understand and what they can watch happen to understand it. A list of features, brand adjectives and preferred colors leaves the central explanation undecided.
An audience question and an accurate example give the team a reference for the storyboard and visual review. Narration follows once the pictures can demonstrate the answer.
The downloadable brief includes a completed example and fillable fields.
Define the viewer's starting point
“Anyone interested in our software” is too broad to guide a film. Describe someone with a particular task and enough context to recognize the problem.
Our fictional product, DispatchDesk, routes incoming support tickets. The example viewer is a support lead who assigns tickets manually and wants to understand what a routing rule changes. They already know what a ticket and a team are. They do not need a lesson about customer support itself.
Their question is specific: “How does a checkout problem reach the right team, and can I still see its urgency?” That question gives the film a useful boundary. A tour of reports, integrations and billing would distract from the answer.
Record the viewing context too. A visitor encountering a small, muted player needs visible evidence that can survive without narration. A learner following a help-center tutorial may deliberately pause and replay a detailed step. Those situations call for different amounts of context.
Choose a result the picture can establish
Write the desired understanding in one complete sentence. Then identify the event that supports it.
| Brief field | DispatchDesk example |
|---|---|
| Desired understanding | A matching rule sends a checkout ticket to Payments while retaining its urgent priority. |
| Starting state | Ticket DD-1042 is unassigned, categorized as Checkout and marked Urgent. |
| Action | A rule matches Category equals Checkout and chooses Team Payments. |
| Proof frame | The same ticket now shows Payments and still shows Urgent. |
| Limit of the evidence | The rule assigned the ticket; an agent still needs to address the customer's problem. |
This is an original demonstration scenario. For a real product, replace the invented fields and behavior with current evidence. A claim about saved time or improved revenue would require evidence beyond this visual example.
The proof frame is particularly useful during review. If the final ticket is too small, disappears too quickly or silently changes identity, the explanation has a concrete defect you can identify.
Make exclusions part of the brief
A short film cannot settle every question the product raises. Record what belongs elsewhere before production begins.
For DispatchDesk, this film excludes rule precedence, permissions, round-robin assignment and resolution time. A longer tutorial might include a nonmatching Billing ticket to clarify the condition. A launch film might stop after the first successful assignment.
Exclusions also expose dependencies. If the intended audience cannot understand a rule without first learning categories, either establish categories briefly or make that knowledge an explicit prerequisite. Leaving the dependency unspoken makes the editor solve it later with extra scenes.
Connect the brief to production decisions
The brief should identify who verifies product behavior, who reviews the visual direction and who approves the final cut. Keep unknowns visible, with a person responsible for resolving each one.
Record the intended player, aspect ratio, captions, audio and any alternative versions. Agree source-file delivery, revision rounds and schedule in the proposal. Downloading a template does not establish those commercial terms.
The production sequence is concept flow, visuals, narration, then audio. The brief defines the explanation, and the storyboard specifies its visible actions. After the team reviews that sequence, the narrator can refer to the actual objects and changes on screen. A finished voice track written before those decisions can constrain the film around an explanation that has never been tested visually.
A brief-writing exercise
Choose one task in your product and complete these sentences:
- The viewer is trying to ___.
- They currently misunderstand ___.
- The visible change is ___, and its cause is ___.
- The final frame will let them verify ___.
- This film will not attempt to explain ___.
Ask a colleague to describe the proposed film using only your answers. If they describe a different task, tighten the brief before adding production detail. If the result depends on an unsupported assumption, use the product-truth worksheet to resolve it.
What if the product has no interface?
Use a diagram, a physical demonstration or an accurate representation of inputs and outputs. Label conceptual illustrations when they could be mistaken for the actual product. The requirement is still a visible causal explanation: what enters, what changes and what the resulting state means.
A brief passes when a colleague can name the viewer's task, describe the proposed visible change, and identify the evidence that establishes it. Download the template or request a preview for your product.