What a launch film is actually for

Clients usually judge a launch film by its views in the first fortnight. It is the wrong measure, and it leads to the wrong film. Views are mostly bought or lucky. What a launch film actually does, if it is planned well, is set the reference for everything that follows: every cut-down, social post, advert, product video and shop-window screen for the next two or three years. Somebody will make those pieces, and most of the time it will not be us. They will open the launch film, watch it twice and copy it. So the film has to be worth copying.

Start with the cut-downs

We plan a launch film backwards. Before anyone writes a script, we list every format the brand will need in its first year, with the length and ratio of each. For Fontela, the sparkling spring water we launched last year, that list ran to nineteen items, from a six-second vertical clip to a ninety-second film for a trade fair stand.

The main film is then built from scenes that make sense on their own, at six, fifteen and thirty seconds, in vertical as well as wide. Every shot is framed with the vertical crop marked in the viewfinder. It constrains the director, and it means the cut-downs are edits rather than reshoots.

Show the behaviour, not just the product

The second job of a launch film is to show how the brand moves. Our identities come with motion rules: a few verbs, four durations, two easing curves. The film is the first place most people, including the client’s own team, see those rules working at full length. If the mark settles late in the film, the editor making next spring’s advert will make it settle late too. For Fontela the verbs were rise and settle, like bubbles in a glass. The whole film is cut on that rhythm: shots that drift upwards and hold a beat longer than you expect. Fontela’s own team has made more than forty social clips since, and all of them move the same way.

The launch film is the one piece everyone will copy, so make it the one worth copying.

What we hand over with it

• The film, and every cut-down we planned, edited and graded.
• A project file with the title cards, the end frame and the logo animation as separate, editable layers.
• A one-page edit guide: shot lengths, cutting rhythm, music tempo, and what never happens, such as speed ramps or whip pans.
• A library of unused shots, graded to match, so the next editor does not start from nothing.

The unused footage is often the most valuable part. A day’s shoot produces hours of material that fits the brand exactly, and most of it never makes the main film. Handed over properly, it feeds a year of social content.

What it costs, and where to save

A launch film with us usually takes four to eight weeks, depending on whether we are shooting, building in 3D or both. The temptation is to spend nearly all the budget on the hero film and leave the cut-downs to whoever has time. We would rather make a slightly shorter main film and plan every version properly, because the versions are what most people will actually see. The television spot we made for Kestle in 2018 is still the best example we have. It ran for six weeks. The motion and the edit rhythm it set were still being used in Kestle’s product videos four years later, by a team who had never met us. That is what a launch film is for.