Everything You Need to Know About Producing Your First Video in Chicago

Every project starts with an all-hands planning meeting. At this stage, we work with clients to determine the goals of the video and go over the initial creative vision, if the client has something already in mind. This gives everyone a chance to start the project on equal footing. 

Our marketing team then researches the client’s existing marketing materials to establish the brand’s look and feel. Once we have a style sheet in place, our writers and creative team craft a script around the initially established goals. Talent is then matched to the script and the production team creates a shot list and starts identifying locations to shoot. 

With the groundwork complete, the production process could go several ways depending on current restrictions due to the pandemic. For traditional productions, SolidLine Media handles the shoots and handles narration or audio recording as necessary. In situations where pandemic restrictions would cause limitations for our team to handle video production, we’ve provided tools and resources for our clients to capture the raw video footage themselves and provided a way to upload that material to our teams for post-production processing. In either case, our design team works with the footage throughout production to create any visuals and graphics that will be necessary for the final video.

In the last phase, our production team edits together raw footage with high definition editing equipment and folds in any motion graphics, 3D animation, or other content outside of the raw footage. The team then starts the process of iterating with the client through the editing stage to arrive at the final cut of the video. 

There’s an extremely long, complicated, and detailed discussion behind the question of how much a high-quality video should cost to produce that is well beyond the scope of this conversation, but we can provide some insight into some of the factors that can impact the pricing.

• What type of marketing video content are you looking for? Explainer videos, product videos, event videos–each of these types of video have an ideal length. The length of the video will greatly impact costs.
• Production value will have an impact on overall costs. Live-action videos require actors, location costs, and other considerations. Animated video projects, on the other hand, have other cost considerations that must be taken into account. In either case, sound recording and editing will have their associated costs, and heavy editing in the post-production phases will increase those costs.
• Poor planning on the front end will lead to extensive reshoots and edits on the back-end, where those changes to the overall project will cost money.

For a more detailed breakdown, there’s an article on Medium that, while it’s a few years out of date, still provides an excellent breakdown in where a full video production can expect to spend significant portions of the budget.