It is not the budget and it is not the brief. It is the approval structure, and it is fixable.
Corporate films fail in a specific and predictable way, and it is almost never for the reasons the post-mortem lands on. Not the budget. Not the brief. Not the client having no taste.
The real cause is the approval structure
They fail because eleven people had to agree, and the only thing eleven people can reliably agree on is the absence of a point of view. Every round of feedback removes the sharpest element, because the sharpest element is the one somebody objects to. Run that process four times and you arrive at something nobody objects to and nobody remembers.
This is not a failure of the people involved. It is what the structure produces. Decent films made this way are accidents.
The fix is structural, not creative
Decide who the single approver is before the treatment is written, and tell everyone else they are being consulted rather than deciding. That one change does more for the finished film than any amount of craft downstream.
The second fix costs nothing: refuse to open on the building. There is always a shot of the building. Nobody has ever watched a corporate film and thought, at last, the premises.
What to open on instead
Someone doing the actual work, mid-task, without looking at camera. It is the cheapest shot on the list and it tells a viewer more in three seconds than the drone footage does in twenty.
The test I use: if the first ten seconds could belong to any company in the sector, they are the wrong ten seconds. Specificity is the entire currency here, and it is usually available for free.
Why the genre is worth taking seriously
Corporate is the category everybody does badly, which makes it the easiest one to win. The bar is a drone shot, a boardroom, and a piece of music that resolves too neatly. Clearing it is not hard. It mostly requires refusing the defaults that everyone else accepts because they are what the last one looked like.
- Opinion