The brief is usually some version of "make us feel the way our best customers feel about us." That's a much harder ask than it sounds.
Brand films are the work we do most often, and the discipline we've spent the most time refining. We answer the brief with cinema-first craft. No talking heads, no voice-over, no stock-music montage, unless the story actually asks for one.
The room as it is, the food at the moment it's plated, the people on the line at 7pm on a Friday. That's where the brand lives.
Brand films don't have to look like brand films. The same camera package and the same color science that produces feature work also produces a brand film that doesn't put viewers to sleep. That's most of the difference between a piece that runs once and one that lives on a homepage for two years.
We work small. A two-person crew with the right kit can shoot a national brand film in two cities for under fifteen thousand dollars (Bartaco proves this). When the budget is bigger, the crew scales, but the discipline doesn't change.
We also do the unsexy parts: cutdowns, vertical reformats, paid-social variants, master deliveries. The hero film is the start; the system around it is what earns the budget back over the year that follows.
Carmella's was a $0 spec piece. We made it on our own dime as a relationship-building film with a Greenville cafe. The owner wanted to be on camera as the founder. The film's instinct was to put the food on camera and let her show up at minute 1:00 in a single uncut take.
It became the shot she shows people first when they ask about the film. Spec work is how this practice grows. About 30% of our brand-side conversations start with a spec piece we made before there was a brief.
"Bartaco knew exactly what they wanted: not an ad, not a montage, but a film that captured the way the room actually feels at 7pm on a Friday. That's a much harder brief than "shoot the food beautifully.""
— Maxwell Ridgeway, Director
- $15k Bartaco — two cities, two-person crew
- $0 Carmella's — spec piece, full finish
- 2 coasts NYC + Carolinas (we travel for the right brief)
- 24 hr Turnaround on first read of any brand brief
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Brief
You send us the rough. 24-hour turnaround on a creative read, a budget range, and an honest yes/no.
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Treatment
Director's treatment, shot list, lookbook. The film is decided before the camera comes out.
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Production
Two-person crew or twenty. Either way: over-prepped, on-schedule, calm.
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Editorial
Director's cut, then client cut. We hold the line on the script through the edit.
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Color & sound
In-house color in Resolve. Sound design and mix to spec, scored to track.
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Cutdowns & deliver
Hero cut + 30s + 15s + verticals + squares + archive masters. You own everything.
Brand films are not advertising. The good ones become reference material: the file the founder sends a new hire on day one, the asset the agency licenses for the next campaign, the cut that hangs at the trade-show booth for the next three years.
We build for the long tail. Send us the brief and we'll come back inside 24 hours.
- RED V-Raptor Theatrical-grade capture for hero-film dimension.
- Atlas Orion Anamorphic glass for the cinema feel out of the camera.
- Aputure Nova Soft-source LED for hospitality interiors.
- DJI Ronin 4D Handheld stabilized for runs through the room.
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It depends on the brief. Our smallest brand film budgets start around $10-15k for a single-location, two-person-crew piece. Hospitality brand films like Bartaco run $15-50k depending on number of locations and shoot days. National brand films with full crews and multiple cities run $75-250k+. We're transparent about budget tiers and what each one buys you on the first call.
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Standard timeline is 4-6 weeks from brief to final cut. That includes a week of pre-production, 1-3 shoot days, and 3-4 weeks of post. We've delivered tighter (a campaign in 10 days when the brief was a launch) but tight timelines remove the discovery phase that often produces the strongest creative.
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Hero cut + a 30-second cutdown + a 15-second cutdown + vertical (9:16) and square (1:1) reformats for paid social, plus full-resolution archival masters in ProRes or H.264. We can deliver to any spec: broadcast, OTT, social, web. You own everything.
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Yes. We write director's treatments, shot lists, and lookbooks as part of pre-production. Most brand films don't have scripted dialogue (they're documentary-style coverage of the brand in action), but when they do, we draft and direct.
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Two coasts: New York City and Greenville, South Carolina. We've shot brand films from Boston to Charleston, Brooklyn to the Carolinas, and we travel for the right project.
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We don't run paid-media (no buying ads), but we deliver the assets paid-media needs: 6-second hooks, 15s and 30s cutdowns for YouTube/Meta, vertical 9:16 for TikTok and Reels, square 1:1 for feed. We work alongside in-house performance teams and outside media agencies.