Pre-Production is a general term used by the Film industry for planning your production. It includes everything from project conception and writing, right through to the booking of locations, cast and crew. There's also a lot in between!
Whoever you are, whatever you do a plan ALWAYS helps.
From my research and experience, the average spend on a corporate film is between £15,000 and £5,000, for creative ads this range will be between £50,000 and £5,000 (depending on so many variables) for the ad not including the potential media spend.
Going into this budget should be a good amount of Pre-Production time. Without valuable research and planning time, put simply you are just risking your budget, in a rather rash way.
So what is a sensible spend or timeframe for Pre-Production? Well you won't be surprised will you if I say... how long is a piece of string?
For some projects this stage is minimal. For others I have had as much Pre-Production budget as Production. A good way to think about VALUE here is, content that doesn't represent your brand well will eventually be more damaging than any budget you're willing to allot to it! Bad content, poorly researched or thought out will make your key followers lose sight of who you are as a brand. It could confuse new customers. It will maybe attract the wrong audience. This same thing can be said about 'VIRAL' content. So what if loads of people like it! So what if loads of people love it. Good content seen by millions of the wrong audience, well that's maybe not good content at all. Beer Advert's could be made for a Craft Beer drinker or for a Macro Market Lager Guzzler. Whichever category you're in, good stuff, but if you make the Macro ad for the Craft market, well they may be a little disenfranchised!
Of course Pre-Production doesn't just cover conception and writing, but if we're creating a corporate project there can be lots of moving parts with arranging shooting times with a busy or high-powered CEO, member of the management team etc or even a group being in the same location at the same time. Especially with the WFH (working from home) revolution... can we get everyone in one location at once. Are they prepared with the right script? Is it just questions they answer off the cuff? Are the facts, figures and statements correct? There's nothing worse than getting the £5,000 a day CEO in the office to speak through a script where all your facts and figures are wrong. Maybe he wouldn't know. So fact checking in Pre-Production becomes a lot more valuable than you thought.
Truly the list goes on. From planning and storyboarding the right shots to having a good idea where the loo's are... it's all relevant.
So if you receive a budget from a Video Production Company who factor in a Pre-Production budget, feel confident and comfortable that you're in the right hands, rather than trying to dodge a few pounds extra cost. They may be putting a couple extra days work in before arriving on set but this time could eventually be invaluable.
If you have any questions about planning an upcoming Film, Video or Animation project we'd love to help - so feel free to contact us.