The generator has no idea what you pictured. It fills every gap in your brief with its own defaults, and its defaults look like everybody else’s film. A vague brief still gets you a film. You get the average one.
AI production makes this worse in one specific way: iteration feels free, so teams brief loosely and plan to fix things in the rounds. The rounds then fill up with discoveries that belonged in the brief. Here is the template I would hand any client. Ten fields, grouped into five steps. Fill them in and the first round comes back looking like the thing in your head. Skip them and you pay for the gap in revisions.
Start by saying what the film is for.
Objective. What should happen after someone watches? Pick one business outcome, such as enquiries for a development or a product people recognise on the shelf. “More awareness” is a wish.
Audience. Who they are, where they will see the film and what they already believe about you. Someone scrolling a vertical feed on the way to work and a family watching a cinema pre-roll need different films.
The one line. The single sentence the viewer should leave with. If you can’t write it, nobody can film it.
Show the production team what you picture.
References. AI production runs on references. Send frames, films and stills that show the light, colour, pacing and casting you want, and say what you like about each one. “The light in this, ignore the wardrobe” is far more useful than a folder of unlabelled images. Send what you hate as well. A reference you reject now saves a round you would otherwise spend rejecting it on screen.
Mark each reference as mood or must-match. A mood reference says “something like this”. A must-match reference says “exactly this”, and the team will treat it that way.
Write down what cannot change.
Product truth. Label text, colours, cap, proportions, packaging and claims. Send real photos and the actual packshot files with the brief. A link to your website is a scavenger hunt. On the Inora product visuals, we worked from the brand’s own photos and matched the exact label details and colour tones. That only works when the photos arrive with the brief.
Mandatories. Logo, end frame, legal lines, music restrictions and anything the brand must never show. Separate facts from preferences here. The wrong label is a failure. A slightly darker sky is a taste call, and your brief should make it obvious which is which.
List every version you need before anything is made.
Formats and versions. Aspect ratios, durations, cutdowns and stills. A vertical cut planned from the start gets framed for vertical. One requested at the end is a crop, and it looks like one.
Languages. Name every language, who writes each script and who approves it. If there is an Arabic version, brief it as its own film with its own script, voice and on-screen text. I made the longer case for this in Your Strategy Needs a Passport.
Decide who approves the work, and by when.
Approvals. Name the one person with final say. List who else must see the work, at which stage, and whether legal gets a look before release. Approval chains are where fast productions go to die. A stakeholder who first sees the film on the last day is a scheduling mistake somebody made weeks earlier.
Deadline. The date the film has to be live, plus the dates you will return feedback. Your feedback time is part of the production schedule. Every day the team waits for comments is a production day you have spent.
Put all ten on one page. Send it with the references, then ask the production company to play the brief back to you in their own words before anything is generated. If their version of the film differs from yours, you have found the problem at the cheapest moment it will ever be.