The most common unspoken objection to booking a shoot is not price. It is how much of the day it is going to cost, and whether work has to stop. So here is the whole thing, start to finish.
Before the day
We agree a shot list in advance, which is mostly a conversation about what you sell and what you have never been able to show properly. You tell us the constraints — the room that is always busy, the machine that cannot stop, the client who cannot be filmed, the hour when the light comes through the front windows.
That conversation is also where the cutdowns get planned. Deciding afterwards what a shoot should have produced is how one day turns into one week of content instead of six.
We come to you
The kit travels. That matters more than it sounds, because the things worth filming in these industries cannot be brought anywhere — a house, a boat in the water, an excavator on a lot, a job site mid-build. Everything gets shot where it lives, in the conditions it actually exists in.
The day itself
- Arrival and walkthrough, about twenty minutes. We look at where the light is and decide the order to work in.
- Setup, around thirty minutes, usually in whichever space you need least.
- Shooting in blocks. We work around your operation rather than the other way round — if a room frees up unexpectedly, we take it then and come back to the plan afterwards.
- People, if any. Kept short deliberately. Nobody enjoys this part and it goes better when it is quick.
- Details last. Close work that needs nobody's attention, which can happen while you get on with the day.
For most businesses that is half a day. Larger sites and multi-location work run a full day. In either case, work does not stop — we have never needed a business to close.
What we need from you
- A tidy version of the spaces we are shooting. Not staged — tidy.
- One person we can ask questions, who does not have to stay with us the whole time.
- Access to anything locked, arranged before we arrive rather than during.
- Half an hour of somebody's attention if people are appearing on camera.
- Somewhere to park close enough to carry equipment from, which sounds trivial and is not.
What we do not need
- Your whole team standing around.
- Work to pause.
- Anything bought, hired or staged for the day. If it is not normally there, it should not be in the frame.
Afterwards
Selects come back first, then edits on an agreed schedule. One shoot day should produce enough material to cover several weeks of publishing — that is the entire point, because the alternative is filming something new every week forever, which nobody sustains.
If a shoot day produces one week of content, it was planned badly. Plan the cutdowns before the shoot and the same day yields stills, short video and long-form together.
More on how much you actually need in how much content does a business need per month.