Four minutes, watched once.

Brand films get longer for organisational reasons, not creative ones. Every person in the approval chain has something they need represented, each request is individually reasonable, and the film absorbs all of them. The result is complete, accurate, and unwatchable.

Nobody sets out to make a four-minute film. It accumulates. By the time anyone notices, the runtime feels like a fact rather than a choice, and the conversation shifts to trimming seconds instead of asking what the film is for.

Purpose, not length.

Runtime is a symptom, never the disease. When a film knows the single thing it exists to do, the cuts make themselves, because every shot can be measured against one question instead of five stakeholders. Length stops being negotiated and starts being a result.

The ninety-second version of our film is not the four-minute version compressed. It is a different film, made after we finally answered what the piece was for, and almost none of the removed material was bad. It was just serving a purpose the film did not have.

Cut before you shoot.

Write the one-sentence purpose before the shot list, then kill every planned setup that does not serve it. On paper. Editing is enormously cheaper in a document than in post, and every shot removed at brief stage is a shot nobody has to defend later.

Run the same test on the finished edit. If a sequence can be removed without damaging the one sentence, it is decoration, and decoration is what makes people stop watching at second forty.

The brief is the edit.

Most films are lost in the brief, not the timeline. By the time footage exists, the structural decisions have been made and the editor is doing damage control on choices that happened weeks earlier in a document nobody stress-tested.

A brief that hurts to write is a film that is easy to cut. The pain is the work of deciding, happening at the cheapest possible moment.

What to lose first.

Lose the establishing shot, the second product beat, and any line of voiceover that the visuals already say. Those three cuts alone usually recover thirty seconds without touching anything anyone will miss.

Then check the opening five seconds honestly. If they do not earn the next five, nothing later in the film gets seen, regardless of how good it is.

Shorter, and stronger for it.

Ninety seconds is not a limitation imposed on the idea. It is what remains once the film stops apologising for itself.

Every film we have made since has started with the sentence, not the shot list.