A Film Should Have a Job This is a title
I’ve spent much of my career being asked what a film will cost before anybody has really asked what the film needs to do.
“How much for a two-minute film?”
“Could we make something for the website?”
“We need a recruitment video.”
“We’ve got a conference coming up and we’d like a film to open it.”
All perfectly reasonable requests.
But increasingly, I think we’re starting with the wrong question.
Because “a two-minute film” isn’t a job.
Neither is “something for the website”.
And “we need a corporate video” definitely isn’t one.
Before we decide what we’re going to make, I think there’s a much simpler question worth asking:
What needs to be different after somebody has watched it?
The film isn’t the objective
This sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to forget.
A business decides it needs a film and almost immediately the conversation moves towards production.
How long should it be?
Who should appear in it?
Where will we film?
Do we need animation?
Should we use a drone?
All of those questions may eventually matter.
But not yet.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve become such a believer that the camera should come later.
First, we need to understand the problem.
Then we can decide what, if anything, the camera has to do with solving it.
So what does a job actually look like?
A film’s job doesn’t have to sound impressive.
In fact, some of the best ones I’ve worked on have had remarkably simple jobs.
A patient might need to feel less frightened about a treatment they’re about to receive.
A potential employee might need to understand what working inside a business really feels like.
A customer might need to trust something they can’t physically see.
A sales team might need a better way of explaining something they’ve struggled to put into words.
Someone living with a particular condition might simply want another person to understand a little of what their everyday life feels like.
A business might be doing something genuinely remarkable, but its customers don’t understand why it matters.
That’s something I’ve written about recently in Making Invisible Value Visible.
These are all very different films.
But more importantly, they’re very different jobs.
And once we understand the job, an awful lot of the production decisions become easier.
“We need more views”
Maybe.
Views can absolutely matter.
If the job of the film is to introduce a business to thousands of people who have never heard of it, reach could be extremely important.
But I’ve also made films where 100 views from exactly the right people would be considerably more valuable than 100,000 views from everybody else.
That’s why I think we need to be careful about treating views, likes and completion rates as universal measures of success.
I’ve explored that in more detail in Video Engagement: Views Aren’t the Same as Impact.
The right measure depends on the job we gave the film in the first place.
What happened afterwards?
This is the bit I find far more interesting.
Did somebody understand something they didn’t understand before?
Did a conversation become easier?
Did an employee decide to apply?
Did a patient feel reassured?
Did a potential customer finally understand why one business was different from another?
Did somebody change their mind?
Did they do something?
Sometimes the evidence will appear in analytics.
Sometimes it won’t.
Human behaviour doesn’t always fit neatly into a dashboard.
That’s something organisations such as Think with Google have explored extensively when looking at the complexity of people’s decision-making journeys.
For me, the important part is simpler.
Something should happen because the film exists.
Otherwise I’m not entirely sure why we’re making it.
Deliverables aren’t outcomes
There’s another distinction I’ve become increasingly conscious of.
Our industry is very good at describing what you’re buying.
One hero film.
Three social edits.
Six cutdowns.
Photography.
Animation.
Drone footage.
Different aspect ratios.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those things. They’re useful deliverables.
But they aren’t outcomes.
They describe what gets handed over at the end of a production.
They don’t tell us whether any of it needed to exist in the first place.
I’d rather begin somewhere else.
What isn’t happening?
Why isn’t it happening?
Who needs to understand something differently?
And what might help change that?
Only then do I want to start talking about what we should make.
Sometimes film isn’t the answer
This is perhaps the slightly awkward bit for somebody who earns his living making films.
Sometimes, once we’ve properly understood the job, we might discover that film isn’t the best tool for it.
I’d rather know that before somebody has spent thousands of pounds.
Perhaps the problem is the website.
Perhaps the sales team is telling three different versions of the same story.
Perhaps nobody has properly worked out who the audience is.
Perhaps the proposition itself isn’t clear.
Making a beautiful film won’t necessarily solve any of those things.
Sometimes it just films the confusion.
And that’s expensive confusion.
Give the film something useful to do
None of this means every film needs to transform a company.
Some jobs are small.
Some are enormous.
What matters is that we’re clear about which one we’re dealing with.
If we’re asking an organisation to invest £10,000, £20,000 or considerably more in a piece of communication, I think we owe them a better answer than:
“It’ll look great.”
We should know why we’re making it.
We should know who it’s for.
We should have some idea what we want that person to think, feel, understand or do differently afterwards.
And we should be able to look back later and ask whether it happened.
One question before the camera
So perhaps the next time somebody in your business says:
“We need a film.”
Don’t start by asking how long it should be.
Don’t start with the budget.
And definitely don’t start with the drone.
Start here:
What isn’t happening in our business today that needs to be happening?
If we can answer that, we can start working out whether a film might help.
And if it can…
we’ve just given the film its job.