How To Save Money On Video Production - Part 2

Let’s be honest, we all love a good deal. Unless your money is unlimited (please let me know your secret if that’s the case), you’re trying to save some dough.

If you’re the marketing director or maybe in charge of this project, you want to be able to show off how much you got for how little you paid. Just imagine people in your office throwing you up in a chair in celebration like at Chloe’s bat mitzvah, and others vying for your job jealously accusing you, “there’s no way you did that for this price!”

Okay, okay, don’t float away on me now. It might not be that extravagant, but I have some ways that you could save hundreds, or even thousands, and that can be good money towards other marketing items. Your boss will definitely pat you on the back for that. It’s not a parade, but it’s a start.

Part 1 was all about creative ideas on how to save money. This one will be more about how I witness companies wasting money on video projects. And it’s usually one major way…

Not inputting time for brainstorming and planning. Bad idea. Bad. (One more) Bad.

If you can do this thing right, you’d fix a lot of the things that make budgets skyrocket. Let me give you the view from my end of a project…

We’re all in our offices or on a video shoot working on all our current projects. I’ll be editing a project when my phone rings. I pick up. It’s a new client. “Hey, we’ve got a project. Can you shoot tomorrow?”. I look at my calendar. There are 5 deadlines we have to hit by next week. Our next two weeks are packed. This is the number one way to feed into the memes about video production clients. Just Google it.

I get it from your end too. Your office is probably in the exact same position. You’ve got a tight deadline, there are miscommunications, someone planned poorly, and now it all falls on you. We’ve been in the game long enough to understand that life and work are messy and far from perfect. I get that an event can pop up last minute, that totally makes sense. But a lot of the time it’s because someone just wants something very quickly and puts a deadline on it. How do I know? Well, we finish something in a very short amount of time because it’s due, but then we’re waiting for weeks to hear back on revisions. I’m not trying to come across as “complain-y”, I just want to say that there’s more time than we think for a lot of things, so let’s just put a couple more weeks on something for the sake of making it BETTER.

With the amount of work our production team has on our plate, it’s pretty rare that we can make a last minute shoot happen, even with the rush fee. And even if we can make it work, it’s not worth it for you.

Okay, I’m done talking about us, this is about you. I just wanted to give some context why we aren’t able to do last minute shoots. Here’s why they’re horrible for you.

1. You’ll almost always come out with a lesser product, most likely bad

   If you’re rushing, there’s no way you’ve thought deeply about what will work best for your need, or what you actually really need. So bad input means bad output. Bad video. Get on a 15-30 minute call and we’ll have great clarifying questions and some creative ideas. It’s like calling a friend after a breakup, we’ll save you from making some bad decisions.

2. You’ll spend more money doing a reshoot

   Wow, how many filming days have been added on after a client needed more footage for something because of poor planning?

3. You’ll spend more money in an edit

   Because neither you or our film team know the end product, we will exceed the budget due to revisions and re-edits, causing that budget to grow like my uncle’s beer belly (it’s not small).

4. You’ll make less money because of bad marketing

   Without planning, there goes the chance of a viral video.

5. The company goes bankrupt because of you

   Okay, I’m just making sure you’re still reading. If the company goes bankrupt because of one last minute, poorly planned video, it was already burning, the smoke alarms didn’t work, you should maybe get a lawyer because I’m not 100% sure, but your CEO could be using the company as a front for his crime ring… you should probably get out, maybe call someone else besides us.

So, all that to say, if you make time for brainstorming and planning with the video production team, you’ll be a hero. Not only to the production team, but also to your team. Yeah, maybe you all have a great idea for a video, but the right video team might and probably will give you some even better options since it’s what they do all day every day. A good video team isn’t just there to film, a good video team is there to help strategize. So if you’re just paying for someone to come in and film, you’re losing out on a ton of value. So before you call and ask for a video to be shot this week, pump the breaks and talk to the video team and ask them what they’d do. I can almost see you in the office being hoisted up on that chair of celebration.