HOW MUCH DOES A CORPORATE VIDEO COST?
YOU KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY AND HOW YOU WANT TO SAY IT, BUT WHAT IS YOUR BUDGET?
How much will my film cost? Is inevitably our first question. The unhelpful answer is of course, how long is a piece of string? You may want a simple one-day, one-man shoot with a quick one-day edit, and you can probably get that for under a grand if you’re not too fussy and it really is just a one-day edit. Or you might want an ambitious creative concept, with lots of pre-production followed by a complex week-long shoot, filming on a RED camera, and lots of complicated compositing and animated graphics. And that could be £20 - £30 000. Or more.
If it is a massive budget like that, the chances are you are talking to a bigger production company than mine, and you will probably be spending an awful lot more margin just paying for their overheads. Which, to be honest, they need because they are churning high budget work all year round. But if you want a competitive quote on a higher budget production, nonetheless do please feel free to ask. We do do them, as you will have seen.
Mainly though, this article is to do a simple breakdown of modest corporate video production costs. Technology, as I’m sure you know, means one human can rock up with a drone, a gimbal, several cameras, radio mics, three point lighting kit, tripods, autocue and green screen, and then pop home and edit the whole thing on their laptop. This means corporate videography is now highly affordable and often quite complex jobs can be achieved fairly simply and cost-effectively.
For a one-man band like this, you will be looking at a fee of between £450 and £600 per day for filming, and between £250 and £400 per day for editing. There are more expensive people than this, and as I’m sure you will discover there are cheaper. A word of warning: go above £600 per day for a videographer and there is a likelihood they will be overcharging you, and for everything. Go below £400 per day and you are playing Russian Roulette with quality. There are a LOT of videographers out there. But there are also a lot of really cheap bad videographers.
And a day rate is all well and good, but how long does it take to edit a film though, I hear you ask. It’s a good question, because you may well have a young “reasonably priced” videographer who claims they can edit at £100 a day (if you do, by the way, you should be worried, because this is below the rate paid forty years ago) and £100 a day is only cheap if it takes a couple of days. If that newbie invoices you for fifteen days, it isnt so cheap any more.
With most small corporates, promos and testimonials, we only use highly experienced editors meaning the total edit only tends to take 2 - 3 days, at a rate of £350 per day. That rate includes your copyright, your licenced music, your standard graphics and sound mix and delivery by download.
And part of why it is quick is because we shoot to edit, which is why you are paying a decent amount of money for the cameraman. Sometimes films are delivered with no picture grading at all, simply because our guy did such a good job in camera.
So in total, most small corporate videos tend to cost between £1100 and £1800 for a finished product with the sweet spot usually being around the £1400 mark. Sure there are cheaper ways to make a video, just like there is always the option todo Valentine’s Dinner at MacDonalds. You wouldnt, would you?
But for high quality corporate video production, these rates are hard to beat.
OUR RATES IN A NUTSHELL
Videographer & Kit hire (lights, cameras, teleprompt, green screen, radio mics, gimbal, drone, transport all included)
£500 p/d (over 2 days reduced to £450 p/d)
Editing (inclusive of music, rights, graphics, download)
£350 p/d (over 2 days reduced to £300 p/d)
AVERAGE TOTAL: £1100 - £1800 for completed film
Versioning and cut downs tend to add only a day per version, sometimes even less if it is a very simple short added version, and this we can create a bespoke rate for your needs.