The first thing is who the clients are. The message they're trying to convey. I'm trying to understand their values, who they are, and I'm trying to create something that feels authentic to them. But then on the flip side of this, I'm also thinking about the audience. As much as the information and the objective are all vital parts of any production, if we don't make something that an audience is going to want to watch and remember, there's kind of not a whole lot of point in doing it in the first place.

Finding the personality of the business through analyzing the brief is the most exciting part for me personally. Most clients demonstrate how they approach their work through the way they write the brief. Letting people speak the way they want to speak about their work brings the authenticity and enables us to understand what sort of film they're after.

With casual, creative is in-house and therefore embedded across the process. You know, everyone's aligned on the idea from the beginning, and we all know what is being proposed. Work with producers to know what we're proposing is doable. You know, we've, for example, checked in with animators to establish, you know, just how long that point-of-view character-led animation is going to take.

We know whether the filming technique that we're proposing is possible, in a client's office, for example, or their onsite studio.

Sometimes what can happen is through the process, whether it's an animation, you go on set, you film, or you go into post-production, sometimes degree by degree, just in small increments, little changes will come back. And in isolation, those changes are small, and a lot of them are completely, you know, it's part of the process.

What can happen is you can get to the end of the process, and there's been enough of those little pullbacks or those little changes that you find the creative approach has actually been quite diluted. It's just trying to reassure clients and take them on the journey with us and keep them on that journey.

What is it? Who's it for? And why should I bother? That's reducing it right down, obviously, but I find it really helpful. You know, the what makes sure you really get to the core of the messaging. The who is all about the client brand and their audience. And the why is, I guess it's really where the heart is, so to speak.

It's where the question of values lies.

Yes, and it will be sad to say no. We live on different continents. We have different cultural backgrounds, and this is the beauty of being a multinational company. We can work together for the big global brands, and we can separate for a little bit to tailor the experience for smaller companies.

I think what I'd say to brands who are looking to up their creative output is to take a few more risks. And that isn't risks in terms of the messaging; you know, there are certain anchor points in the brief that need to stay true. And that will always, no matter what the ideas or the execution are, we'll always bring it back to, you know, we know who we're speaking to. We know the tone of voice we want to speak to them in. We know the information that we are. Getting across. It's just the way that we do it. That's the differentiator that we bring. The job is to really figure out a way of saying something that might have been said before or might be being said by someone else and to say it differently.

You know your brand better than anyone else. So before you come to us, it's so important to work out why you want to make this video, what you're trying to achieve, and what you want people to do after they've watched that brand film, for example. Our job is to connect all those dots. But it's essential to know what the foundations are.

Put yourself in the shoes of the audience. Think about the kind of things that you like watching or that you engage with on a social media platform or a training video, which has made a really lasting impact on you. Because ultimately we are making the film for the audience, and we need to make something that they're going to want to watch.