How a Commercial Actually Gets Made

Most commercials don't fail in the edit. They fail in the first week, before a camera is rented, when nobody quite agreed on what the film was for. What follows isn't a checklist to feel organized by — it's the order in which decisions get expensive. Make the cheap ones first.

1. Name the job, not the deliverable

"We need a commercial" is a format, not a goal. Before anything else, write one sentence: what does someone believe, feel, or do after watching that they didn't before? If that sentence has an "and" in it, you have two films — pick one. Every later argument, from casting to music to length, gets settled by pointing back at it.

2. Find the idea, then say it out loud to a stranger

A concept is a promise about how you'll earn thirty seconds of attention. Test it by describing it to someone who isn't working on it. If they can repeat it back, it's a concept. If they say "cool, so it's nice shots of the product," it's a mood board — kill it now, on a call, not later, in a color suite.

3. Pre-production is where the money actually gets spent

Boards, casting, locations, and the shot list decide most of what the finished film can be, while it's still free to change your mind. A shoot day is just the most expensive way to execute choices you already made. If pre-pro feels slow, it's working.

4. Shoot for the edit you want, not the coverage you're afraid to miss

The temptation on set is to grab everything. The discipline is to protect the three shots the film can't live without, then get your safeties. Shoot only the storyboard and you have no edit; shoot forty setups "just in case" and you have no film either.

5. Cut it once, then cut it again for everywhere it lives

The hero cut is the start of the work, not the end. A thirty-second broadcast spot, a six-second bumper, a vertical social edit, and a set of stills are four different films that happen to share footage. Decide those crops before the shoot, or you'll spend the edit apologizing for a wide frame with nowhere to breathe on a phone.

None of this is complicated. It's just easy to skip the parts that feel like paperwork, and hard to recover the ones you skipped. A commercial nobody agreed on is the most expensive kind — you pay for it twice, once to make it and once to explain why it didn't work.

If you'd rather run this process with a crew that does it every week, book a 15-minute call.