-
Budgeting for Corporate Video
Does anyone have an Excel template for a Video Production Budget with line items? If there is a site with downloads, that would be great. Also, typical rates updated to 2012. Any help would be appreciated
-
8 Replies
-
Each project is so unique – not gonna happen.
Shoot Day(s)
Number of people
locations
Audio tech
Telepromter
Number of cameras
Make-up
Script writing
Hours of editing
Music royalty fees
Voice Talent
on and on and onOur quotes tend to have the following:
Day(s) of production $
Editing $
Voice Talent and Studio Fees $
Music royalty fees $
Dubs $Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC -
It sounds like you’re not particularly familiar with quoting projects like this.
My advice is to partner with someone who is. There are countless variables that you need to anticipate if you don’t want to get hosed on a quote.
Video production is something that looks pretty easy from the outside, – particularly in the era of cheap gear and so many people who “think” they know the process because they’ve read up on it. But when money and peoples time is on the line, it’s amazingly easy it is to waste both both and have your results dragged down into mediocrity by poor planning.
Budgeting – hand in hand with it’s twin program support pillar, scriptwriting – are the two foundations that you’re success or failure will end up balanced upon.
You might start out by doing a search on “above the line” and “below the line” as terms. This is how many professional projects have been quoted for a long time and it gives you a grounding in thinking about budgeting not just as it relates to day rates and gear and consumables, but also budgeting for the thinking and administrative time that is required to organize a video project so that it has a decent chance of success.
It’s kinda one of those deals where if you don’t know the right questions to ask – you’ll very rarely get many useful answers.
Good luck.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
-
Frequent COW contributor Richard Harrington did a video for lynda.com all about video budgeting. You could probably get a 30 Free Trial, although they are well worth the subscription cost. Here is a link:
https://www.lynda.com/course-tutorials/Budgeting-Video-Projects/96667-2.html
-
When figuring out your pricing, be sure to account for stuff you can’t actually charge for directly (electricity, phone, gas – in other words, overhead).
Your price may be a day rate or a project price. In either case make sure you are covering the three buckets: your labor, your overhead and profit.
You need to eat.
You need to pay for your rent and equipment.
And you need profit either to put away for a rainy day, to reinvest in the company or to pay your shareholders.You see some young people charging say $400 for a shoot. Seems like good money but they are not making enough to sustain the business.
But no, there is no universal budgeting tool. Too many variables and specific situations. Talk to your accountant to figure out how much you actually need to charge to cover your 3 buckets.
Mike Cohen
-
Don’t forget to account for a little bit of profit- you’d be surprised…
Noah
Call Box Training.
Featuring the Panasonic GH2 and Panasonic AC160/130. -
All fantastic answers above. I’ve noticed that no one really talks about rate — as you also asked — and I think that’s because of a few reasons: no one really wants to tip their hand, it’s insanely competitive out there, and if you’re like me, you don’t always charge the same rate. I’ll charge significantly less for non-profits trying to get off the ground than I will for one of my Fortune 500 clients. I also charge more for the one-time, nit-picky long sales-cycle clients than I do for the folks I really hit it off with, who appear to want to build a relationship, not just get a job done.
It’s a maddening field that’s also a ton of fun. Good luck.
-
All great points.
One other factor is that roughly a third of what you make less expenses will be handed over to Uncle Sam (for U.S. companies anyway) at the end of the year. I don’t necessarily increase the quote by 33% but I do factor this in to my overhead. That was probably one of the most important of many lessons learned in my first year.
Cole
-
I’ll support this by saying that the number one mistakes I usually see new folks make on their pricing is not considering their tax burden. The close second is not accounting for equipment depreciation as an actual cost of doing business. That $3000 gizmo you’re so proud of today will probably be worth a fifth of that when it’s replaced with a new model next year – particularly if it has memory and/or a processor inside.
Missing either in your calculations will give you a deeply skewed idea of whether you’re making or losing money and building (or not building!) a sustainable business.
FWIW.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up