What Should Video Cost

How much will it cost?

One of the first questions businesses ask about video production is also one of the hardest to get a straight answer to: how much will it cost?

There isn’t a standard price because there isn’t a standard corporate video. A straightforward company profile filmed at one location is very different from a campaign involving several filming days, interviews, aerial footage, photography and multiple finished films.

The useful question is what actually affects the cost.

What are you trying to communicate?

This is where every project should start.

Is the film introducing your business, explaining a complicated process, recruiting staff, launching something new or creating content for a wider campaign?

Once that’s clear, it’s much easier to determine what’s actually required. That might mean one filming day or several, interviews or no interviews, one location or many, graphics, drone footage, photography or additional versions for different platforms.

More production doesn’t necessarily make a better film. The right production does.

Where does the budget go?

A significant amount of work happens away from the camera.

Planning, filming and editing are the obvious parts, but there may also be research, location preparation, interview development, music, sound mixing, colour grading, graphics and multiple deliverables.

The length of the finished film can be misleading too. Turning hours of material into a clear 90-second story can require more work than producing something considerably longer.

Think beyond one film

It’s worth considering what else you might need before filming begins.

The same production can potentially create shorter edits, social content, website footage, interview extracts and still photography.

For organisations that regularly need content, planning for a library of useful material can offer much better value than commissioning one film and starting again six months later.

So what should a corporate video cost?

There isn’t one meaningful figure. A focused one-day production might cost considerably less than a multi-location project involving several filming days and multiple deliverables.

But a good production company should be able to explain where your money is going and why.

The best place to start isn’t with the length of the video or the number of filming days. It’s with three questions:

What do you need to communicate? Who needs to hear it? What do you want them to do afterwards?

Answer those first, and it’s much easier to build a production and a budget that make sense.

What should you budget?

Professional video production can start from around £1,000 for a relatively straightforward project, but there isn’t a meaningful upper figure. A production involving several filming days, multiple locations, interviews, specialist equipment, graphics, photography or numerous finished assets will naturally require a larger budget.

Rather than beginning with a number, it is usually more useful to establish what the video needs to achieve, where it will be used and what needs to be produced. From there, the scope and budget can be built around the job.