French Press Suits & Ties

Before going any further, I’m going to acknowledge something right off the bat — French Press is one of about a million production companies in the Bay Area (171,000,000 results come up in Google), and choosing one out of a ton of options can be overwhelming.
So why work with French Press, or any video production company for that matter? Over the years, we’ve realized that our real value is tied to our desire - before a project is even awarded - to understand what it is we’re actually doing. Yeah, we’re producing a commercial, or an animated explainer, but ultimately we’re in the business of solving problems. Plain and simple. Here’s an inside look at how we do it:
- What are your success metrics? How will this project be successful for you and your team? Are eyeballs (views) the most important thing? Do you want to drive traffic to download your app? Is this purely a brand awareness campaign? Defining success before we move into concepting helps us to begin honing in our approach.


- Who is your audience? Who are you talking to and, more importantly, has this been defined? A values video that is for a specific audience is going to have a completely different voice and tone than a showpiece for the same brand.
- What is the distribution plan? Where is this video going to live? Is the plan for it to live online only or will it be on the tv? If the video is online, will it be the standard two-minute web video or will it be much shorter? Will it need to be cut down and reused for preroll?
- What is your experience with video production? Have you ever done anything like this before? More often than not, one of the first things we hear from a client when we show up on the day of production is, “Wow! This is like a real movie!” While that’s great and all, we want to be able to set expectations early on about what to expect when our cameras start rollin’.


Once we‘ve gone through this together, then the real work begins. Our approach is a lot more more than merely throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks — the more information we have before we start, the better video we’ll make and the more successful your project will be. We’ve actually found that after working through these questions, some clients aren’t ready to move into video production — which is totally fine! One of the most important parts of our job is to figure out the best way to tell your story, and we’ve found that makes for a much better experience before signing on that dotted line.

