How Long Should a Brand Film Be
The honest answer is that the story decides the length, not the client brief. But since you are probably planning a budget, a deliverable, or a platform rollout, a more useful answer is this. There are ranges that work for each type of brand film, and understanding what drives those ranges will help you scope your project without fighting against the material.
This page is for brand managers, marketing directors, and producers trying to figure out how long their brand film should actually be. I will walk you through typical ranges for each format, what moves the length inside each range, and the mistakes that come from deciding the length before the story.
The ranges that work in practice
These are the ranges I see working in real projects. Other editors will give you different numbers based on their own experience, but the ballparks are consistent across the Canadian market.
Brand documentary: 5 to 20 minutes. The broadest category. A 5-minute documentary can carry a focused character study with one subject and a clear arc. A 20-minute documentary has room for multiple characters, parallel storylines, and longer scenes that build emotion. The length that fits depends entirely on what the material supports.
Hero brand film for website: 3 to 7 minutes. The flagship piece that lives on the homepage or the main brand page. Short enough that viewers actually finish it, long enough to build a real story. Three minutes can work for a sharp character piece. Five to seven minutes is the sweet spot for most hero films.
Social cut: 30 seconds. The platform decides the length here. Anything longer loses viewers before the story lands.
Trailer: 30 seconds to 90 seconds. The role of the trailer is to create curiosity for the full film, not to deliver the story in miniature. That constraint tends to produce the sharpest edits.
Feature-length brand documentary: 45 to 75 minutes. This is the rarest format. Feature-length requires a story substantial enough to sustain attention, and a distribution strategy that justifies the investment. Most brand documentaries that aim for feature length should have been 20 minutes.
What moves the length inside each range
The same format can vary by 50 percent in runtime depending on a few factors.
The number of characters. A film following one person is usually shorter than a film following three. Each character needs space to be introduced, developed, and resolved. If you cannot give a character 90 seconds of meaningful screen time, they probably should not be in the film.
The complexity of the arc. A simple story (one subject, one turning point, one resolution) can land in 4 minutes. A layered story with parallel threads and historical context needs more room, often 10 to 15 minutes.
The audience context. A film made for an industry audience that already understands the stakes can be shorter. A film made for a general audience has to build that context before the story can land, which adds minutes.
The distribution tier. A film destined for a film festival or a streaming platform accommodates longer runtimes because the viewer has committed to watching. A film living on a company website or LinkedIn has a narrower attention window and usually needs to be tighter.
Where brand films go wrong on length
Four mistakes show up repeatedly in projects that miss their target.
Losing the story in an attempt to please everyone
The most common failure. A film starts with a clear idea during production, but somewhere in post-production the edit has to accommodate too many stakeholders, and the final cut becomes a collage of moments that pleases no one. Nobody can say exactly why the film does not land, but everyone feels it. This is almost always an editorial problem disguised as a length problem. The cut lost the thread of the story, and adding or cutting minutes will not fix it.
Playing it safe
A brand film that refuses to take any editorial risk is a film that nobody remembers. Safe pacing, safe music, safe structure. These films usually land at an acceptable length but fail at their actual job, which is to make someone feel something. A brand film that plays it safe is often 10 percent too long, because the edit has no conviction about what to protect and what to cut.
Over-trimming until the emotion disappears
The opposite error. A film gets recut for length, scene by scene, until the moments that would have carried emotion have been shaved down to efficient information delivery. The film is now 90 seconds shorter and 40 percent less effective. Emotion in documentary editing requires space, and space requires runtime.
Forcing a slow story into a fast deliverable
A client commissions a brand film about a subject that needs to unfold patiently, and then requests a 90-second cut with the same impact as the full version. The story does not have time to develop. The emotional beats land before they have been earned. The film fails because the format was wrong for the material from the start, not because the edit was wrong.
Constraints and the craft of cutting
Here is the other side of the length question. Platform constraints are not always the enemy. A film made for a 2-minute LinkedIn slot, or a 45-second YouTube pre-roll, forces editorial discipline that can sharpen a piece. Creativity tends to come from working inside limits, not from ignoring them.
The real editorial skill is knowing which scenes serve the story and which ones are in the way, even when the scenes in the way are beautiful. Editors sometimes call this "killing your own babies", and it is one of the hardest lessons of the craft. A scene can be powerful on its own and still drain the momentum from the film it sits inside. A moment can be emotionally true and still be the wrong moment to end on. A great interview line can still have to go, because the cut before it already made the same point.
The right length for your brand film is the length at which every remaining scene earns its place. Not one minute longer, not one minute shorter.
How to think about length before you start
Three questions to answer during scoping, before the first day of production.
What is the story you are trying to tell, and does it naturally want to be short or long? Some stories are 3-minute stories. Some are 15-minute stories. Pretending otherwise produces a weaker film.
Where will the film live, and what is the realistic attention window? A homepage hero film has a different attention window than a festival submission. Length should match the context of viewing.
Are you committing to one film or multiple deliverables? A 12-minute hero film with a 90-second trailer and a 30-second social cut is a different project than a single 12-minute film. Each deliverable needs editorial attention of its own, not automated re-cuts.
With honest answers to those three, the length discussion becomes much simpler.
Working with an editor who respects the story
I work as a freelance video editor based in Montreal, editing story-driven brand films and documentaries for agencies, production companies, and brands across Canada. The length conversation is one I have on almost every project, and my approach is consistent. The story tells me the length. My job is to protect the scenes that carry the film, cut the ones that do not, and defend the runtime the material earns.
If you are planning a brand film and want to talk through the right length for your story, let's talk.
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