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 — and 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.