A YouTube Shorts editor brief template

I sent an editor a brief for a 30-second short last year. It had a logline, a script, a target audience, a list of references, three pages of "tone" notes. He came back with a video that was structurally fine and tonally wrong. We did four revisions before I figured out what the brief was missing.

The brief I now send for shorts is half a page. It works better. Below is the template, but more importantly, the reason long-form briefs make short-form editing worse.

Long-form briefs make short-form videos slower

The default editor-brief format most teams use was designed for long-form video. Long-form briefs front-load context: who is this for, what is the broader narrative, what tone, what references. Editors of long-form content need that because they're making hundreds of micro-decisions over 8 to 12 minutes.

Shorts don't have that surface area. A 30-second video has maybe 10 cut decisions, 5 overlay decisions, 2 music choices. Front-loading context doesn't help — what helps is constraint. The editor needs to know what not to do, much more than what the tone is.

I keep the brief short on purpose. Six fields.

The template

1. Logline. One sentence. The video in one sentence as a viewer would summarize it after watching. Not what it's "about" — what they'd repeat to someone else.

2. Hook second-by-second. The first 3 seconds, scripted to the syllable. No paraphrasing. The editor needs to know exactly which words are landing where because the cut timing depends on it.

3. Beat map. The full video by 5-second segments, with each segment labeled by what new information arrives. Not the script — the structural events. "0-5: hook claim. 5-15: setup of mechanism. 15-25: example. 25-30: takeaway."

4. Visual stack. What's on screen for each beat. Reference shots, b-roll requirements, overlay text. This is the only "long" section in the template, but it's bullet points, not prose.

5. Music intent. Not a song — an intent. "Steady forward push, no swell, no drop." Editors who get a specific song link will hand you a video edited to that song's structure even if it doesn't fit. Intent gives them freedom to pick a track that actually works.

6. The "what this is not" section.

That last one is the section that prevents 80% of revisions.

"What this is not"

This is three to five lines of negative constraint. Examples from briefs I've shipped:

• This is not a high-energy explainer. No whip cuts. No bass drop on the takeaway.
• This is not a personal story. The "I" voice in the script is rhetorical, not autobiographical. Treat the speaker as a teacher, not a vlogger.
• This is not formal. No lower-thirds, no name introduction, no "welcome back to my channel."

Editors are mostly working from pattern match. When you say "high-energy fitness short" they pull a template that includes whip cuts, screen shake, a bass drop, captions in three weights, a sponsor outro. If you don't want any of that, you have to name the absence. The negative space is the brief.

Without this section, you and the editor will discover the negative space through revisions — slow and expensive. With it, most of the disagreement resolves before the first cut.

This is also why long-form-style briefs fail at shorts: long-form briefs assume the editor will use judgment on small decisions, because the brief can't cover every cut. Shorts have so few small decisions that the brief actually can cover them — but only by naming what's excluded.

A worked example

This is the brief I sent for a short that performed well last quarter.

Logline: Your sleep architecture matters more than your protein intake for muscle recovery.

Hook seconds 0-3: "The reason you can't recover from your workouts isn't your protein."

Beat map:

• 0-3: hook claim
• 3-12: contrarian setup (most people fix protein first)
• 12-25: the actual mechanism (deep sleep, GH release, etc.)
• 25-32: tactical takeaway (one specific thing to do)
• 32-35: implied CTA, no spoken CTA

Visual stack:

• 0-12: talking head, mid-shot, slight zoom-in on contradiction beat
• 12-25: cut to one annotated diagram (sleep stages bar), held for 8s
• 25-32: cut back to talking head, no movement
• 32-35: title card with takeaway in 2 words

Music intent: Quiet, no drop, no swell. Carries presence, doesn't compete.

What this is not:

• Not a high-energy "wake up and crush it" video. Vibe is informed, not motivational.
• Not a personal story. Script is in second person; treat the speaker as a coach.
• No captions on screen during the talking-head segments. Only the diagram and the final title card carry text.

That brief took 12 minutes to write. The first cut was 90% there. We did one round of revisions on b-roll selection. Done in two days.

What's worth automating

The beat map and the "what this is not" sections are the slow parts. The logline writes itself once you have the video; the visual stack is just specifying. The beat map requires you to understand structure (see this on extracting one). The negative-constraint section requires you to know what the default editor pattern match would do, then override it.

That last bit is niche-specific. Editors who work primarily on fitness shorts have a different default than editors who work on finance shorts. Your "what this is not" section is also your editor's onboarding to your specific aesthetic — and worth keeping a copy of and adjusting per project.

The beat-map plus negative-constraint output is the part ShortRemix's brief generator handles. If you'd rather do it yourself, copy the brief above and adapt it. The structure transfers.