Music Video Production: From Your Track to Release Week

A music video is one of the few pieces of content where the creative decision and the commercial decision are the same decision. The video is what people share, what gets cut up for Reels and TikTok, what someone sees before they have heard the chorus properly. So it helps to understand the shape of the process before you commission one, because knowing where the decisions get made is the difference between a shoot that feels under control and one that feels like it is happening to you.

What follows is how music video production tends to run with a small crew: the kind of team that can shoot a single-location performance piece or a tight narrative in a day, without three layers of production between you and the camera.

Treatment and concept

The treatment is the document that turns "I want something moody with a car" into a plan someone can shoot.

For a small production it does not need to be fifteen pages of mood boards. It needs to answer a handful of questions clearly. What happens in the video, in order. Where it happens. What the visual language is: handheld or sticks, wide or long lens, warm or cold, high contrast or soft. Whether there is a performance element and how much of the runtime it takes. Whether anyone other than you appears.

The useful discipline is that a treatment forces you to commit. Vague briefs get expensive, because every unresolved question becomes a decision made at 4pm on the shoot day when everyone is tired and the light is going. If the treatment says the second verse is shot entirely on a long lens from across the road, the crew knows what to bring and roughly how long it will take.

References are the fastest route there. Send three videos you like and, more importantly, say what you like about each. "I like this one" is not information. "I like how flat and grey this looks, and I like that the artist is barely in focus for the first thirty seconds" is extremely useful information. It stops the whole thing becoming a guessing game about taste.

Be honest, too, about what the track can carry. A sparse, slow song and a frantic four-location edit fight each other. Listen to where the music actually changes and build the visual structure around those points, rather than imposing a structure and hoping the song catches up.

Locations and permissions

Locations do more for a modest budget than almost anything else you can spend money on. A genuinely interesting space makes simple coverage look considered. A bland space means you need production design, lighting and movement to compensate, all of which cost time.

The practical questions are the same everywhere. Can you get in, legally? Is there power, or do you need a battery setup? How does the light change across the day, and when is the window you actually want? Is there anywhere to put equipment, and anywhere for the artist to change?

Permissions are where plans quietly fall over. In the UK, filming on the public highway frequently needs clearance from the local authority, and requirements vary considerably between councils. Anything involving a blocked pavement, a vehicle parked to work from, or lighting stands on a street is likely to need a permit and evidence of public liability insurance. Private land always needs written permission, and that includes places that feel public: car parks, shopping centres, station concourses, industrial estates, beaches managed by a trust.

Two habits save a lot of grief. Get permissions in writing, even informal ones, because the person who said yes on the phone may not be the person on site at 7am. And have a fallback for every exterior, because British weather does not care about your release date and a location that only works in sunshine is a single point of failure.

Recces matter as well. Visiting at roughly the time of day you plan to shoot tells you what photographs do not: that the sun is behind the building by three, that there is a delivery bay in constant use, that the road is loud enough to ruin the atmosphere.

The shoot day

A one-day shoot lives or dies on the shot list and the schedule.

The shot list is the treatment broken into individual setups with a rough time against each. The schedule then groups them sensibly: every shot from one camera position before the camera moves, exteriors inside the light window, costume changes bundled so you are not switching four times. The order is almost never the order of the video. You shoot for efficiency and assemble for story.

Playback is the other practical backbone. Performance is filmed with the track playing loudly on set so lip sync and movement match, which means someone owns the playback device and cues the track from the same point every take. It is unglamorous and it makes editing dramatically easier.

Expect to shoot each performance section several times from several angles. That redundancy is what gives the edit rhythm later. A chorus covered once from one position gives an editor nothing to cut to.

With a small crew, the artist does more than turn up. You will be asked for opinions, you will wait while lights are moved, and the energy of the day comes substantially from you. Eat something, bring water, and accept that there will be an hour in the middle where nothing appears to be happening and the crew is solving a problem.

Edit and colour grade

The edit starts with an assembly: everything usable laid against the track, synced, in a rough order. It will feel too long and slightly flat, and that is normal.

From there the work is rhythm. Cutting on the beat for a whole video becomes monotonous, so strong edits play against the music as often as with it, holding shots through transitions and cutting early or late on purpose. This is where the coverage from the shoot day earns its keep.

Expect to see a rough cut, give notes, and see a revised cut. Notes are most useful when they are specific and timecoded. "The second verse drags from 1:40" is workable. "Make it better" is not. Agree how many rounds of revisions are included before the edit begins, because this is the most common source of friction in small productions.

Colour grading comes after the cut is locked. It does two jobs: technical consistency, so shots from different times of day and different lighting conditions match, and creative look, which is the visual identity people actually respond to. A grade cannot rescue badly exposed footage, but it can take competent footage and give it a coherent world. Lock the cut first, because regrading a changed edit is wasted work.

Vertical cuts for release week

The video is the asset. The vertical cuts are what most people will see.

Release week typically needs several things that are not the full video: a vertical teaser, a handful of short clips for Reels, TikTok and Shorts, a loop-friendly moment, something for stories. These work best planned rather than salvaged. Cropping a wide 16:9 frame to 9:16 often removes the composition entirely and leaves you with an awkward centre crop of someone’s chest.

The fix is to decide at the briefing stage that vertical cuts are part of the deliverable. Then the operator can frame certain shots with headroom and centred subjects so both ratios work, or shoot dedicated vertical passes of key performance moments while the setup is already lit. Ten minutes on the day saves a compromise later.

Think about what each clip is for, too. A hook-led fifteen second clip landing on the strongest line of the song does a different job from a slower atmospheric teaser posted the week before. Ask for a small, varied set rather than twelve near-identical fragments. Our music videos page sets out how the long form and short form deliverables are usually scoped as a single job rather than two.

How to brief a production team

A strong brief is short and specific. Include the track, ideally the final mix. Include your release date and any fixed dates around it. Include two or three references with notes on what you like about them. Include your budget, honestly, because that is what determines whether the conversation is about two locations or one.

Then be clear about deliverables: full video, aspect ratios, how many vertical cuts, whether you want stills from the day, what turnaround you need. And be clear about who has final sign-off, because a video approved by committee takes twice as long and usually ends up blander.

If you have a release to plan around and want a team that works at this scale, you can explore music video production from Flexxed and open the conversation with the track and the date.