Notes for owners · Branding and communication
Video cutdowns for advertising
One shoot has to produce a 30, a 15, a 6, three shapes and two languages. That is decided on the storyboard, not in the edit suite, and the count multiplies faster than anyone budgets for.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
A cutdown is a shorter version of a film, made from the footage of a longer one, because the slot you bought is fifteen seconds and the film is thirty. Every campaign needs them and almost nobody plans for them. The versions get discussed after the shoot, when the only footage that exists is the footage somebody thought to capture. Then the six-second version turns out to be the thirty with the middle deleted.
The work belongs at the storyboard. Decide the durations and the shapes before anyone hires a camera.
The durations are four different arguments
A thirty makes a case: a situation, a turn, a product, a brand. A fifteen makes a claim and attaches a name to it. A ten is a name, one image and one line. A six is a poster with sound.
Try to compress the thirty into the six and you get the first two beats of a story that never arrives. Write the six on its own, from the same idea, and you get an advertisement. It is the same brief and a different piece of writing.
There is a practical consequence for the shoot. The short versions live almost entirely on the product shot and the end frame. Shoot those cleanly, longer than you need, with nobody speaking over them, and shoot two or three alternatives. Those are the frames you will be grateful for.
The shapes are recomposed, not cropped
Television and connected TV want a wide frame. Feeds and Shorts want a tall one. Some placements want a square.
A tall version made by cropping a wide one puts half a face at the edge and cuts the product out of the shot. Recompose it, shot by shot, moving the frame around inside the footage where the resolution allows it and reshooting the two or three moments where it does not.
Captions and supers are the part that gets missed. A line of type scaled down to fit a narrow frame becomes unreadable on a phone held at arm's length. Set it again, at the right size for that shape.
Then keep the bottom fifth of a vertical frame clear. Platforms put their own buttons, names and captions there, and your phone number will be sitting underneath a Follow button.
The count multiplies, and somebody has to make each file
| Campaign | Durations | Shapes | Languages | Files |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One channel, one market | 30, 15 | 16:9 | Kannada | 2 |
| Television and digital, one state | 30, 15, 10, 6 | 16:9, 9:16 | Kannada | 8 |
| Two states, television and digital | 30, 15, 10, 6 | 16:9, 9:16, 1:1 | Kannada, Telugu | 24 |
| The version above with a festive offer change | 30, 15, 10, 6 | 16:9, 9:16, 1:1 | Kannada, Telugu | 48 |
Read that last row before you approve a campaign. Forty-eight files means forty-eight approvals, forty-eight deliveries and forty-eight chances for the wrong one to air. If the media plan does not justify a version, do not make it.
The audio multiplies too. Ask the composer for the music cut to each duration, ending on a resolved note rather than chopped mid-bar, and ask for the stems. A voice-over is recorded per duration; a thirty-second read sped up to fit fifteen sounds exactly like a thirty-second read sped up.
Name the files as if a stranger will deliver them
At some point the files leave your hands and go to a media buyer, a channel traffic desk and two platform teams. A folder of files called final, final2 and final_new is how the wrong offer ends up on air for a week.
Use one pattern for every file: brand, campaign, duration, shape, language, version. Something like GS_Deepavali_15_9x16_KAN_v3. Then keep a single delivery sheet listing every file, where it is going, the material deadline and whether it has been approved.
Somebody has to own that sheet, and it is the least interesting document in the campaign. It is also the one that stops a Telugu voice-over running on a Kannada channel.
Approve the set, not the films
Cutdowns get approved one at a time, on different days, by different people. That is how a campaign ends up with four versions that do not look like each other. The colour drifts. The end frame sits a little higher in one. The offer line is worded two ways.
Watch them together in one sitting, in the order a buyer might meet them, and watch each one on the device it will play on. The vertical cut on a phone. The thirty on a television, from across the room, with the sound where a family would keep it.
Two things to check in that sitting. Is the brand recognisable in the first second of every version, and does the end frame sit in the same place at the same size in all of them? Those two are what make a set of files read as one campaign rather than as a run of separate advertisements.
Lock the master before any version is cut. A change to the master after the versions exist is not one change. It is as many changes as there are files.
A worked example
A jewellery chain in Bengaluru shoots one film for the wedding season. Two days, one set, one model, one voice-over and no dialogue to camera.
On the storyboard the team marks which shots belong to the 30, which to the 15, and which two frames the 6 is built from. The necklace shot is captured wide and again tight for the vertical version. The end frame is designed first, in all three shapes.
Delivery is eight files for the first burst and sixteen once the Telugu buy for the Ballari and Raichur belt is added. The Telugu version needed one extra recording session and no reshoot, because nobody in the film ever opens their mouth.
What to do next
Before the next shoot, write the delivery list on one page: every duration, every shape, every language, and the date each one is needed. Give that page to the production house with the script and ask them to price against it. If a version on the list has no placement waiting for it, strike it out. Nobody misses it. To have the media plan and the film brief built from the same page, book the free audit.