We get asked this on nearly every video project. The honest answer is “shorter than you’re picturing”, but that’s not very helpful on its own, so here’s how we actually think about it.
Start with where people will watch it
A company film playing on a screen at your stand at a trade fair is a very different thing from a video on your website’s About page, and both are different from a clip on Instagram. The length should follow the place.
Rough guide, based on what we’ve seen work:
- Social media clips: 15 to 45 seconds. Most people decide in the first two or three seconds whether to keep watching.
- Website About or homepage video: 60 to 90 seconds. Long enough to say who you are and what you do, short enough that people actually finish it.
- Investor, board or recruitment films: 2 to 4 minutes. This audience is more committed, but they still drift.
- Event openers and conference screens: 1 to 3 minutes, and it needs to work without sound in case the audio isn’t on.
Why shorter usually works better
It’s not that people have short attention spans. People will happily watch a two hour film. It’s that they won’t sit through something that doesn’t need to be long. A company video that runs five minutes usually has about ninety seconds of genuinely interesting content and three and a half minutes of the CEO thanking people and drone shots of the building.
When we cut a long film down, it almost always gets better. The strongest moments are still there, just with less waiting around between them.
The clips matter more than you'd think
Here’s the bit clients often don’t plan for. The full film gets watched a few hundred times. The short clips cut from it, posted on LinkedIn, Instagram and WhatsApp status, often get seen far more. So we plan for them from the start.
That means getting a few strong standalone moments during filming: a staff member explaining something clearly in one sentence, a good shot of the product in use, a customer reaction. It also means shooting with vertical crops in mind, so we’re not chopping people’s heads off when we turn a wide shot into a 9:16 clip later.
On most projects we now deliver one main film and somewhere between three and six short cuts. It costs a little more in the edit, but you get a lot more use out of the day of filming.
How to keep it short at the script stage
The easiest place to cut length is before anyone picks up a camera. A few things that help:
- Decide the one thing you want viewers to remember. Just one.
- Limit it to two or three people speaking. Every extra interview adds time and dilutes the message.
- Write it down. Even if the final film is all interviews, a rough outline stops it wandering.
- Agree on a target length with the decision makers before the shoot, not after the first edit.
That last one saves a lot of friction. It’s much easier to agree “90 seconds” in a meeting than to argue about which department’s segment gets cut from a four minute rough cut.
If you’re planning a company film, we’d love to hear about it. Our videography page shows the kind of work we do, and you can get in touch here.
Header photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash.
