A Video Budget Starts With a Conversation, Not a Stopwatch
What to bring to the first conversation, even when you don’t have a complete production brief.
One of the more common questions I get is, “Hey, how much does a two-minute video cost?” And it's a question that makes sense for folks who are looking for a ballpark figure.
But duration isn’t the primary driver in the overall budget of a project.
Embedded in the question are a series of presumptions about the actual content that need to be made explicit before a project can be translated into even a realistic budget estimate.
tl;dr: Two minutes tells me how long a finished video is. It doesn’t provide the details required to produce the outcome you have in mind or how we’ll get there together, and that information gap needs to be narrowed to have a real conversation about money.
Prefer to watch? In this video, I talk through what drives production costs, including crew and equipment. Below, I get more specific about what we need to know to turn “a two-minute video” into a useful budget conversation. Here’s a link to get the guide with your email.
What the runtime doesn't tell us
The bigger factors include the following:
How many locations are there?
Every time you have a company move, you lose valuable shooting time.
How many setups in each location?
Once the cameras are on tripods and lights are on stands, it’s easier to move across the hall, but moving between floors or to another building entirely burns time.
How much shooting time do we need in a given day?
Don’t forget there’s setup, wrap time, and around 45 minutes for lunch.
How much equipment is being rented?
Do we have to pay for our location, or is the space owned? If so, how early can we start our day, and when is the freight elevator available?
You can rent space to set the project in a dream setting, just be ready to pay for the privilege.
And then most importantly:
Who's on camera, and how many people at one given time?
Three people total, one at a time in one location, is totally different from six people in two groups of three across two separate locations.
Do we have a limited amount of time to work with them?
Do they have extensive on-camera experience or media training?
Another big variable (if not the biggest):
What’s the time frame between where we are now and when you need the final video? Is that date flexible?
Our typical turnaround time from a signed contract to delivery is 6–10 weeks, depending on scope.
Need it faster? No problem. We can discuss how to implement a tighter production schedule and adjust the budget accordingly.
Let’s look at a more specific example
Say we only have 45 minutes with the CEO to capture a sit-down interview and some meeting b-roll. We would structure the resources available to make that happen.
One approach for that scenario:
Have one fully lit sit-down interview setup in the CEO’s office.
Have a few other lights and crew working in the conference room so we can quickly shift into capturing a mock meeting with the CEO and six other people.
Once we have wide shots and tight shots of the CEO in their element, they can be released and close-ups of everyone else can be captured.
Exteriors, signage, and showcasing your new communal kitchen can be captured in the remaining time while the rest of the crew wrap the equipment.
Basically, we leverage extra crew and equipment to work at peak efficiency to get all of our image and audio capture requirements accomplished in a very narrow window of availability. And maximize our shoot time by keeping the camera running while the more complicated setups are wrapped.
If the added cost of pursuing one path over the other becomes a problem, finding different ways to achieve the broader goals of a project is where great producers can provide the most value for their clients.
What a more answerable budget question looks like
What would a two-minute video cost if we’re planning around the following?
This reference video [LINK] showing the production value and visual approach we have in mind.
One ten-hour shoot day when we have the executive team in one place.
A one-hour CEO interview and two thirty-minute department-head interviews, all in the same conference room with different backgrounds, that need to be completed before noon.
Two hours of b-roll with those three participants in a common space down the hall in the afternoon.
A ten-week schedule from signed contract to delivery, including two focused weeks of collaborative creative development before we start shooting.
Our team has time set aside to participate in creative-development meetings and review/approve the proposed direction.
One cheat code: a proposed runtime AND an example video can go a long way toward clarifying what you’re looking for. You don’t need every detail above before we start talking.
Here’s the quiet part out loud, and a hot take 🔥
Vendors who price based on duration are either baking in a set of limited presumptions based on an existing offer (and will charge for changes accordingly), or they don’t know what they’re doing.
When someone promises a price without understanding what it takes to deliver, the risk lands on everyone involved: the client, the crew, and the project itself.
Production requires answers to a ton of small, medium, and large questions from beginning to end. Don’t worry, great producers have a process they’ve refined over decades to walk you through this.
Here’s a brief peptalk:
You won’t have all the answers at once.
Some matter more than others, and it takes time to reach agreement internally.
Even then, pivoting when it rains, or someone is out sick, is the name of the game.
Decision fatigue is real, pick your battles and honestly delegate accordingly.
Great filmmaking balances the technical, creative, budget, and scheduling realities where everyone is proud of the final product and has fun along the way.
Real talk, dollars edition
Project budget and deliverables are like accordions, expanding and contracting in relationship to each other (hopefully making beautiful music along the way ~ ).
If the dollars have already been allocated, share the number and we can back that into a set of deliverables everyone can agree on.
If you have a clearer sense of the deliverables, along with the time, locations, and people available, we can translate that into an executable action plan and budget.
Somewhere in between? Congratulations, that’s where most clients start.
Either way, you’re going to have to spend some time in internal and external dialogue to align on a creative north star, and develop an executable plan that balances the dream with the reality.
Don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit. When you approach this in a structured way, you give yourself more options — and a better chance of having fun along the way.
We can start with assumptions—but they need to be explicit
We don’t need every answer before we can move forward. We can establish a narrowly defined baseline using my experience with similar productions. But that number comes with assumptions about WHAT we’re making and HOW. As those assumptions change, we may need to adjust the budget, schedule, or approach.
Working through those choices earlier gives us more options.
Piqued your interest and want to learn more?
I put together a guide, called Before the Shoot Starts, which has resources and context to help inform those decisions. So that you’re leveraging the budget that you do have, and making it much more likely that you’ll have a successful video at the end of the process and have a good time doing it.
