How much does it cost to hire an agency to come to our office and shoot a prerecorded event?

Usually between $40-$50K. This includes executive video capture and post-production for a 2-day shoot on location with a green screen. 1 Director, 2 cameramen, 1 sound person, 1 teleprompter operator, and all equipment. Post-production: around 11 days of editing, including revisions.

Sounds like a lot but this is actually a super generous cost for the quality of work we get from super-talented photographer and filmmaker Joe Seif. Here is a full green screen shoot he did for us in 2021.

But after the second highly produced film and a photo shoot for our estaff, I had spent almost 150K on this type of work in less than a year, and video projects for our company were only going to increase going forward so I had to figure something out.

Another factor that is worth noting is Clari’s CEO’s empathy for his employees. He came to me one day during our first shoot and said, “Jessie, this production is incredible and I think every employee and our customers are going to feel special because of this. But what happens next? Is everything after this going to be DIY?” (Side note, this was at the end of 2020 during the peak of the COVID-19 lockdown). At first all I saw was dollar signs and was like, “Yeah dude, we can do this all the time but someone has to pay for it LOL.”

He said, “Our company isn’t small anymore and we are moving to a majority remote workforce. I want every employee to have the same experience or feel just as special no matter where they live. And maybe the way to do that is by having an in-house studio to level up the quality of all of our communications, internal and external.” I thought for a minute and said, “Let me do some homework and get back to you.”

Over the next week or two, my partner in crime Anmol and I researched what needed to happen to make Andy’s dream a reality. And what we found was pretty shocking. Basically, it would cost less than 100K to procure the equipment to recreate a similar setup to what our agency crew was using. That meant that if we do two shoots in less than 1 year, the studio will pay for itself! We had the space in the office already and the know-how given Anmol and I’s past experience creating corporate videos. The only problem was, who would run it once it was built?

The Brief

Requestor- CEO, Creative Director 

Timeline- 6 months

Budget- We had a max budget of 100K

Goal- Build an in-house studio that would allow for a high level of film production to uplevel all internal and external video experiences coming from Clari.

Contributors- Anmol Thiara, Cornelius Willis, Andy Byrne

Process

Once we had a brief and a budget approved we had to figure out the footprint of the area we were going to use for the studio. We ended up using a storage closet in the back of our office. We worked with our facilities team as well as the IT department to make sure that the acoustics were acceptable and that we had enough room for everything to fit. As you can see from the screenshot below there were concerns about ventilation and generally having enough space for all the gear but with enough measuring, we were able to figure out an optimal layout for everything.