Your First Nepal Production Brief

This is a guide to writing that first message so the reply is worth reading. A good brief is not long and it is not a legal document. It is specific about a few things, honest about the rest, and clear about what would end the shoot if it went wrong. Get those three right and the person reading it can start planning instead of interviewing you by email.

None of what follows commits you to anything. It applies whoever you end up hiring, in Nepal or anywhere else with mountains, permits and weather. Treat it as the shape of a first conversation, written down so you only have to have it once.

The gap between a useful reply and a useless one is set before anyone quotes a figure. It is set by how well the first message describes the shoot. A vague enquiry does not get a vague answer, it gets a delay, because the only responsible reply to it is a list of questions. Every day spent on that round is a day not spent on the film.

Think about what the person on the other end is trying to do. They are trying to picture your shoot clearly enough to see where it is hard. Where does the schedule get tight, which permission is slow, which location is exposed to weather, which shot exists only in the treatment. They cannot see any of that from dates and a place name. They can see it from a page that says what you are making, when, with how many people, carrying what, and what the shoot cannot come home without.

The good news is that a strong brief is quick to write, because it leaves out most of the detail that first enquiries tend to over-supply. You are not writing a call sheet. You are drawing a shape and marking the sharp edges. The sections below are that shape, in the order they matter, and each one exists because leaving it out reliably produces a worse answer.

A three-minute brand film, a network documentary strand, a stills commission, an NGO impact piece and a feature scout use the same roads and the same weather and share almost nothing else. Format sets the permitting route, the level of official interest, the kind of local crew that suits the job, and whether anyone needs to sign something before you point a camera at a person.

Broadcast and journalistic work generally sits in a different administrative lane from tourism or personal filming, and commercial advertising sits in another again. Say which lane you think you are in. Name the end client or broadcaster if you can, and if you cannot, name the sector. A drinks brand running a regional campaign tells a fixer far more than the word commercial, because it implies a crew size, a kit list, an agency presence and a set of clearances that the word on its own does not.

Say where the footage ends up, too. A piece going out on a national broadcaster, a piece living quietly on a corporate site, and a piece cut for a festival attract different questions about contributor consent, music and archive clearances, and how identifiable people on screen have agreed to appear. You do not need answers to those questions in the first message. You need to say enough that the person reading knows which of them are going to matter, so the plan makes room for them early rather than late.

Give real dates, even provisional ones, and then say how much they can move. Mid-October fixed by the client and mid-October give or take a fortnight are two different productions, and the difference decides how much weather risk the plan can absorb.

Season drives most of the rest. The monsoon broadly covers the summer months and brings cloud, landslides on hill roads, leeches on trails and unreliable mountain flying. Autumn and spring are the busy trekking periods, which means clearer skies at the price of competition for lodges, for domestic flights, and for the people you need to hire: porters, guides and experienced mountain crew. Porters are crew, not carriage. Their pay, insurance, shelter and load limits belong in the budget from the first draft, and those load limits are part of what decides how much kit the schedule can carry. Winter is colder and clearer at altitude and quieter on the ground, with the trade that high passes and some airstrips are harder or impossible. None of that is a promise about the weather on your dates. It is a description of the odds, and the odds are the only thing anyone can plan against.

Say why the dates are fixed, if they are. Locked to a festival, locked to a client launch and locked because someone already booked flights are three different kinds of fixed, and only one of them is worth defending at the cost of the film. If the person reading your brief knows which kind you are dealing with, they can tell you whether a small shift buys you a much better shoot, or whether you are stuck and the plan has to work around it.

Write two lists. The first is what the shoot fails without. The second is what you would like if the days allow. Keep them apart on the page, and label them clearly, because this one distinction changes more than anything else in a brief.

If the must-have is a single interview with a named contributor plus a day of city cutaways, that is a compact schedule with low exposure to weather and roads. If the must-have is a particular mountain in particular light, the plan has to carry contingency days, a weather window and a fallback that still delivers a film. Someone who knows which is which can protect the right thing when a road closes or a flight does not go. Someone who has been handed a flat list of everything, with no priority attached, has to guess, and will usually guess by protecting the cheapest thing rather than the most important one.

Be honest about the shots that exist only in the treatment. A summit sunrise, a wildlife sighting, a festival crowd behaving the way it behaved in someone else’s footage: these are hopes, not deliverables. Label them as hopes and you will get a straighter answer about how to improve the chances and what to shoot instead. Present them as certainties and you invite a plan that pretends the risk is not there, which is the plan most likely to fail on the day. The bravest and most useful thing a brief can do is admit which of its images are wishes.

Numbers matter more than job titles at this stage. Two people with small kit can move on public transport, change plans in an hour and sleep almost anywhere. Six people with cases need vehicles, permissions arranged for everyone, and accommodation that simply does not exist in some villages. The jump from a pair to a small unit is not linear; it changes the class of problem, and it changes it most in exactly the remote places people most want to film.

Say who is coming from abroad and who you expect to hire locally. Foreign and Nepali passports do not always follow the same route through permissions, and some locations treat the two differently, so the mix matters to the plan and not only to the budget. Say whether anyone has worked at altitude before and whether the schedule takes the team high. Altitude is a medical question before it is a logistical one: take your own medical advice, check what your insurance actually covers, and build the schedule around that advice rather than the other way round. A day of acclimatisation is cheaper than an evacuation and far cheaper than a lost shoot.

Mention on-screen talent, a presenter, and any client or agency representative travelling with you. Someone who expects to watch rushes each evening, or to approve a set-up before it is shot, changes where the unit can sleep and how the day is paced. It is better to say so now than to discover it halfway up a valley with no power and no signal.

You do not need a full kit list, and you certainly do not need lens choices. You need the shape: camera package size, number of cases, rough total weight, and anything that changes the legal picture. Weight matters more than people expect, because it drives what a domestic flight will accept, what a porter can carry, and whether a plan depends on a vehicle that cannot reach where you want to be.

Two things change the legal picture and both belong in the first message. Drones are regulated in Nepal and flying one is not a decision you make on the morning. Approvals involve aviation and other authorities, they take time, and they are location-specific, with airport surrounds, restricted zones, some national parks and some heritage sites treated differently again. Satellite phones and satellite messengers are controlled in many countries, and Nepal has restricted them. Do not assume a device that is legal at home can be carried in, and never assume it can be carried in quietly. Both of these areas have changed more than once, so treat anything you read, including this page, as a prompt to confirm the current position rather than as the answer itself.

Flag heavy or awkward items early: large gimbals, generators, lighting for places without power, a big battery load for a flight. Batteries in particular have their own carriage rules and their own way of complicating an internal flight. Say whether you intend to hire locally rather than bring everything, because that is an availability question as much as a cost one, and the answer varies sharply by season and by how far off the main routes you are going.

Say plainly whether you or anyone on the team has shot in Nepal before. There is no wrong answer and it is not a test. Someone who has done it wants different information: what has changed, what is different this season, who is around, which of last time’s assumptions no longer hold. A first-timer needs the shape of a day explained, including how long roads take against how they look on a map, what an early domestic flight actually involves, and why a sensible schedule has slack built into it rather than a shot in every daylight hour.

Give your delivery deadline as well as your shoot dates, because they are not the same information and the gap between them is where all the risk lives. When the edit locks determines how much you can absorb if a day goes wrong. If you deliver a fortnight after landing, a lost flying day is a serious problem and the plan should be built so you never need one, with fallbacks that can be cut into the same film. If delivery is months out, you can afford to sit and wait for weather, move a day, or try a location twice. Those are different shoots with different appetites for risk, and nobody can tell them apart from shoot dates alone.

The same logic applies to how forgiving the deliverable is. A film that needs one clean interview and some atmosphere can survive almost anything. A film that promises a specific summit at dawn has staked itself on the one thing no one controls. Tell the reader which kind you have, and the plan can be honest about where it is fragile.

A good reply asks questions before it gives numbers. It separates what is knowable now from what depends on the permitting route, the season and your final schedule. It points at the difficult part of your treatment rather than the easy part. It is willing to say that something does not work, or does not work in that month, or does not work at that crew size. It gives ranges and explains what would move them. On permissions it talks about the process and the authority responsible, not the outcome, because the outcome is not theirs to promise.

The warning signs are just as clear. Anyone who says yes to everything has either not read the treatment or intends to renegotiate once you have committed. Anyone who quotes a firm all-in price before seeing a treatment, a schedule and a kit outline is pricing a shape of job, not your job. Anyone who promises a permit approval, a flight, a weather window or an animal is telling you they will say whatever wins the work. Permits are decided by authorities. Weather is weather. Flights go when the cloud lets them. What is genuinely on offer is a route through the process, a realistic read on how long it takes, and a plan for what you shoot if it does not come through.

Ask one more question before you decide: who will actually be with you on the ground, and what happens if that person becomes unavailable. The answer tells you how much of the work is done by the person you have been corresponding with, and how much is subcontracted to people you have not met. Neither answer is wrong on its own. Not knowing the answer is the problem.

Coverage in Nepal is better than many first-time crews expect and worse than a schedule built on constant contact assumes. Kathmandu, Pokhara and the main towns have solid mobile data, and coverage follows the main roads and popular trekking routes further than you might think. Step off those routes, drop into a deep valley, or climb above the last village, and it thins out fast. Plan for stretches with no signal at all, and treat any place you have not personally confirmed as one of them.

A local SIM or data package is worth arranging early for anyone who needs to stay reachable, and it is cheap and simple in the cities. Power is the quieter problem. The grid reaches most inhabited places, but reliability varies, and the further you go from the main centres the more a day runs on solar panels, small generators or whatever the lodge can spare. Charging a camera battery is not guaranteed to be quick or reliable, and a schedule that assumes a full charge every night in a remote village is a schedule that will let you down. Bring more battery capacity than the shot count suggests, and treat power as a resource to manage rather than a tap to turn on.

Agree a check-in plan before anyone goes remote, and say in the brief if a client or broadcaster expects to see rushes each day or to approve set-ups remotely. That expectation quietly decides where the unit can sleep and how the day is paced, and it is far better raised now than discovered in a valley with one bar of signal and a battery close to flat.

This is general background, not a price and not a rule about your shoot, but it shapes how a plan comes together. The Nepali rupee is a closed currency: you cannot buy meaningful amounts of it before you arrive or change it back once you leave, so cash is arranged on the ground. Cities have banks and cash machines; villages and high routes do not, and card payment is rare once you leave the main centres. A remote leg of a shoot often runs on cash carried in, for porters, lodges, local hire and the dozens of small costs a day on the trail generates.

Staged payments are normal for production support work, because costs fall due at different times: permissions early, crew and transport as the shoot runs, settlements at the end. That is a practical rhythm, not a warning sign, and a clear plan will set out what falls when. What you should expect is transparency about what a figure covers and what sits outside it, not a single number with no workings.

At enquiry stage you do not need any of this settled. You need only to know that the answers to how you pay, in what currency, and at what points will follow the plan rather than shape it. Name your budget constraint honestly, ask what drives the cost, and let the mechanics of payment be worked out once the shape of the shoot holds.