Every quarter, a marketing leader asks us the same question: should we make a brand film or a series of interview videos? The honest answer is that they are not the same product, and most companies should make both — but in a particular order, with a particular budget split, for a particular reason.
What each one actually is
Interview video
An interview video is conversational, durable, and cheap to update. It is a person, on camera, answering questions. The setup is simple — usually a single A-cam, sometimes a B-cam, three lights, a boom, a lavalier. The output is one polished hero edit (60 to 90 seconds) plus a library of vertical and 16:9 social cuts. The unit cost is between $15,000 and $35,000 in NYC, depending on whether we are doing one talent or six, one location or three, and whether the audio is union.
Brand film
A brand film is a moment. It is scripted, scored, color-graded to a finished LUT, and treated like a short film. The crew is bigger — a director, a DP, a 1st AC, a gaffer, a key grip, a sound mixer, a producer, hair and makeup, and often a stills photographer riding alongside. There is a treatment, a shotlist, an edit-by-edit storyboard, and a music license. In NYC, brand films land between $40,000 and $250,000 finished, with the median in our work sitting around $80,000.
The order, in 95% of cases
Interview video first, almost always. There are three reasons for this, and they are all financial.
- Interview footage is a content multiplier. One 45-minute founder interview produces six months of LinkedIn cuts. A scripted brand film, by definition, only contains the moments in the script.
- Interview footage is updatable. If your CRO leaves, you re-shoot 30 minutes. A brand film starring her is dead the day she sends the goodbye email.
- Interview footage stress-tests the people. A founder who is stiff on camera will be stiff in the brand film too. The interview is the cheap dress rehearsal for the expensive day.
The exception is when the company has a moment to mark — a Series B, a category launch, a flagship recruiting push tied to a specific class of hire — and the moment cannot be carried by interview footage alone. Then a brand film earns its keep.
“Founders ask for the brand film. Usually they need the interviews. The brand film is a graduation, not a starter kit.”
How to budget the split
Most B2B companies under 500 employees should be running a roughly 70/30 split between interview / B-roll work and scripted brand work — measured in dollars, not in number of projects. That gives you a constant pipeline of new social cuts, careers-page assets, and customer videos, and reserves the bigger budget for a single set-piece film once a year, usually tied to a fundraise or a launch.
Companies that flip that ratio — heavy on the brand film, light on the interview cadence — almost always end the year with a beautiful 90-second hero on the homepage and nothing else. They do the brand film twice. They never solve the rest of the funnel.
Decision matrix
- Founder hiring push → Interview video.
- Series B / new category launch → Brand film.
- Quarterly recruiting refresh → Interview cuts off existing footage.
- Customer story → Interview video, on location with the customer.
- First-ever piece of video the company has commissioned → Interview video.
- Sundance-bound founder, $80M raise, redesigned brand → Brand film, with stills.
End of essay · J—003
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