We love to partner with agencies here at Thin Reel, and it forms a huge part of what we do at the company. Combining your creative vision for a brand or product with our visual expertise and technical know-how is a sure fire-way to produce a winning campaign.
However, we understand that budget considerations are always close behind even the greatest of creative briefs, and, although there isn’t a one-size-fits-all when it comes to pricing a potential agency project, this breakdown should go a long way in helping you understand how we total up the costs for any given production to ensure your creative is achieved - without breaking the bank - across pre, production and post.
Before we get started, we know that different agencies have different capabilities when it comes to how much can be done in-house; some come to us with a clearly defined creative, with even the locations and models booked, whilst others simply get in touch at the concept stage looking for support on the initial idea, as well as assistance in casting, scripting, storyboarding and overall production management. Most are a mix of the two.As we’re well versed in pre-production, for this example let's assume the creative is all in place for a proposed fashion shoot, but the casting, scripting, storyboarding and production management are all areas that need our attention. As Crispin points out in the video above, not all productions need all of the pre-production services listed above. As this particular brief does not need scripting, we can leave this out of our estimate, and focus on the following:
- Casting: £325
- Storyboarding: £800
-Production Management: £325
For this shoot, we need 3 models. Although the models fees aren’t directly considered at this stage, the time it takes to source them needs to be - this shouldn’t take more than a day or two though, so it will be a minimal fee.
Moving onto Production. In this area, we’ll need to work out how many crew members will be needed in order to execute the production properly, as well as factor in the hire costs for both the models booked earlier and the cost of any locations that we’ll be using. We’ll also need to consider how many days it’ll take to capture all of the shots outlined within the storyboard. In this case, 2 days should be enough.C
Crew members: £5,800T
his example project will need 5 crew members, consisting of a Director, Cinematographer, Gaffer, Camera Assistant and a Make-up Artist. Again, not all projects need all of these team members, but for this hypothetical fashion shoot, it’s perfect.
Models: £1,350
Our four models have a fairly decent day rate, so our models come in at just a reasonable £1350 total for the two days.
Locations: £325
Not all locations require a fee, so for our shoot involving a beach, forest and a house location, only the house location has a chargeable fee, giving us a low total of £325.
In the post-production phase we now need to work out the number of deliverables that’ll be needed for the project, more often than not we’ll produce a main campaign video, as well as several, different shorter versions for use on social media. We include 2 revision stages on all of our productions at Thin Reel, just to make sure the client can adjust things to their exact liking in post, so we need to account for this time as well. Again, this should total no more than an additional day or two. We also need to establish the level of animation that’ll be utilised within the edit. This will be made very clear within the creative brief, so this will be easy to work out from the get go. For this example, let’s say we need to produce one main campaign video in 16:9 format, with four social edits to sit alongside it - these will be in 9:16 format. Only light animation will be needed on these too, which will mean shorter post-production times, and fewer days of editing work to account for.
5 Deliverables
1x Main Campaign Video: £900
4x Social Videos: £1,100
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