What We Need Before Production Begins
Every project at Intrigue Studios is different in scope, scale, and complexity. Some productions involve large crews, multiple shoot days, and months of development. Others move quickly with a small team and a focused objective.
What we need from you at the start, however, is consistent across all of them.
Getting these things in place early isn't administrative housekeeping. It directly affects how quickly we can move into development and how smoothly the project runs once it's underway.
Your producer will walk you through each of these directly. This is here so you understand what's coming and why we ask for it early.
1) Your Brand Assets
Before any creative work begins, we need your current brand guidelines, logo files, and any visual style documentation your team uses. This includes color systems, typography, and any usage rules that govern how your brand appears in video.
If you don't have formal brand guidelines, let us know. We'll work with what you have and ask the right questions to fill in the gaps. What slows things down is discovering mid-development that the assets we've been working with are outdated or restricted.
If there are specific brand standards we need to be aware of — approvals required from a parent company, co-brand partners, or licensed elements — flag those at the start, not during review.
Your producer will send you a direct upload link so you can get everything to us in one place without the back-and-forth.
2) A Single Point of Contact
Every project needs one designated person on your side who owns the relationship with Intrigue Studios. All creative direction, feedback, approvals, and scheduling run through that person. Not a committee. Not a shared inbox. One person.
That contact doesn't need to have all the answers — but they need to be the one who gets them. When we're waiting on a decision, we're waiting on one person, and that person knows it's their responsibility to move things forward.
That designated contact should also have — or have direct access to — the authority to approve key project milestones. Script approval, budget approval, rough cut approval, and final delivery sign-off are the decisions that determine whether production moves forward or stalls.
If those approvals require sign-off from ownership, legal, or another stakeholder, your point of contact needs to be the one who coordinates that internally and delivers a single unified response. We can't effectively incorporate conflicting feedback from multiple decision-makers, and we won't hold a production schedule while internal alignment gets worked out after the fact.
If you know going in that certain approvals will involve additional stakeholders, tell us early. We'll build that into the timeline rather than let it become a bottleneck.
3) Any Third-Party Approvals or Restrictions
Some projects involve elements that require clearances, licenses, or approvals outside of your organization — product clearances, location permits, talent agreements, licensed music considerations, or legal and compliance review of script content.
We handle most of this on our end as part of production, but if your organization has internal legal or compliance requirements that affect what can appear in the finished work, we need to know about them before the script is written.
Surprises at the revision stage that trace back to a compliance issue that existed at the start are avoidable. They're also expensive.
That's it.
Three things. Brand assets. A single point of contact with the authority to move decisions forward. And any third-party or internal approval requirements that could affect the work.
Everything else we need — shoot logistics, talent direction, location specifics, product details — gets addressed through the production process as it becomes relevant. But these three things need to be in place before we can do anything else, and getting them resolved early is one of the clearest signals that a project is set up to go well.