Behind the Scenes of Mainstream Production “What you are buying when paying for video”

One way to confuse my potential clients was asking them how much they wanted to spend on pre production, production and post production.

Most people, myself included, didn’t take a video production class. That’s right I got my BA in Media studies and my MA in Film and Visual Cultures which means we wrote about film and video, we didn’t make it. It wasn’t until I got my first production job in 2006 that I finally learned how a video actually gets built.

When I went into the business world this is something I took for granted. I thought everyone knew that it was basically broken up into 3 parts and each part would cost a range depending on what you wanted. What I quickly learned is that’s not the case at all. Most business owners want to know what the finished video is going to cost.

And even though we have package pricing, based on what we think businesses need, if you ever plan to purchase video it’s crucial to know what you’re paying for.

For example I sat down with a client who said “we paid $8000 for a finished 2 minute video, and $125 for another. Now I know the $8000 is much nicer, but how do I understand what exactly went into that cost?” which is why we created a video series to explain just that.  In the “What you are Buying when Paying for Video” series we are going to communicate with you what costs what so you can make an empowered decision on how to budget for your video.

Deciding how to roll out this series was challenging. There is so much information all of which is very important.

First we made an overview video simply breaking down each cost and what you get.

Our goal is to use this in our email campaigns. Right now we are trying to email everyone bi-monthly. We want to build trust, let our audience know we will be sending helpful content that won’t clog up their spam. We also want to give our audience a chance to sort itself. We know our products and services aren’t for everyone so we are hoping that slowly emailing will help weed out those who don’t necessarily want to be hearing from us on a regular basis.