What a Corporate Video Costs

We’re not going to put a price list on this page, because a price list would be a lie. Every quote we write is built from the same six variables, and once you understand them you can work out roughly where your project sits before you speak to anybody.

The six things that move the number

1. Shoot days. This is the biggest number. A crew, kit and location for a day is the unit everything else is built on. One day costs less than two. Two days shot back to back cost less than two days a month apart, because you only travel and set up once.
2. Crew size. A director with a camera is one thing. A director, a DoP, a sound recordist, a gaffer and a runner is another. Interviews with good lighting need more people than a walk-and-talk. We scale the crew to the film, not to a template.
3. Talent. Are you putting your own staff on camera, or hiring actors? Actors mean casting, fees, and sometimes usage rights, which becomes a recurring cost if the film runs as an advert. Your own people are free, and they’re often more convincing.
4. Locations. Your office is free. A studio isn’t. Multiple locations mean travel, travel means time, and time means shoot days. Our Brunei Halal commercial was shot across several West Midlands locations, which is a more expensive shape of job than a single site.
5. Kit. Drone work, a jib, a studio build, specialist lenses. All of it is available and none of it is free. We flew a drone for TNT because the film needed the aerial. We wouldn’t have flown one otherwise.
6. Post-production. Editing is the obvious part. The rest is a grade, a sound mix, motion graphics, subtitles, and versions. Versions matter more than people expect: the same film cut for YouTube, a 60-second social edit, a 30-second edit and a square version is four deliverables, not one.

So the cheapest useful film you can make is a single-day shoot at your own site, with your own staff, and one deliverable. Everything above that is a decision you’re choosing to make, and each of those decisions should be earning its place.

Three real projects, three different scopes

It’s easier to place yourself against real jobs than against a price band.

If your job looks like the middle row, it’s a normal corporate brand film. If it looks like the bottom row, budget accordingly and tell us early.

Why a Midlands base costs you less than a London one

Every corporate video production company on the first page of Google for this search is in London. We aren’t.

We’re based in Nuneaton, we work across Birmingham and the West Midlands, and we travel anywhere. That’s a cost argument rather than a regional one. Crew, kit and studio time all cost less outside the M25, and the work doesn’t get worse for it. The Selco idents ran on Sky Sports 1. The NHS films ran nationally. TNT is a global logistics company. None of that was made in London.

If you’re a London business, we’ll come to you, and the day rate that gets us there is still likely to be lower than a Soho production company’s. If you’re anywhere in the Midlands, you’ve got a crew on your doorstep who have made broadcast work.

How we make it, from brief to delivery

Pre-production. We start with what the film has to achieve, not what it should look like. Then concepts, scripting, a shot list, location scouting, casting if you need it, and a schedule. This is the part that decides whether the shoot day goes well, and it’s the worst place to save money.

The shoot. We show up with the crew the film needs. For Benny Smyth that meant a teleprompter, so a nervous speaker could deliver a scripted piece and still sound like himself. For Selco it meant getting ten distinct idents out of the schedule, which is a planning problem more than a filming one.

Post-production. Edit, grade, sound, graphics, subtitles, and every version you need for every platform you’re putting it on. We’ll ask up front where the film is going, because a film cut for a conference screen isn’t a film cut for LinkedIn.

Briefing your video: what to bring us

You don’t need a script or a storyboard. You need four things, and if you have them the first conversation takes twenty minutes instead of an hour.

1. What the film has to do. Sell, explain, recruit, train, or record. Not “we need a video”.
2. Who is watching it, and where. A film for a trade show isn’t a film for a careers page.
3. What success looks like. If nobody can say, that’s worth knowing before we shoot rather than after.
4. A rough budget. Not a number you’re embarrassed by. It tells us the shape of the film we can make, and it stops us both wasting a week.