Commissioning a film for a commercial scheme: what to have ready before you call anyone

Somebody has decided the scheme needs a film. Possibly the leasing team, possibly the board, possibly the agent who has just seen what a competing building published last week. The job has landed with you, and the brief is one sentence long.

This is written for that moment — for the marketing manager, development surveyor or asset manager who commissions film once or twice a year and wants to arrive at the first call already knowing what they are buying.

Start from where it gets used, not from what it is

The most useful thing you can decide before you speak to anyone is where the finished material has to work. Everything else follows from it.

A film an agent sends the day after a meeting is a different film from the one that autoplays on a letting website, which is different again from the vertical cut that has to stop a scroll on LinkedIn and the two minutes your investors watch at a board update. Most schemes need several of those, made from one visit. Almost no scheme needs one three-minute film asked to do all four jobs badly.

So the first question worth answering internally is not "how long should it be" or "do we want drone". It is: who has to watch this, at what point in their decision, and what do they do next? A production company that does this properly will ask you exactly that on the first call, and if they do not, that tells you something.

What we will ask you, and what it saves

Our scoping call is four questions: the scheme, the completion date, who the film has to persuade, and where it will be used. That is enough to tell you what is worth filming and, just as often, what is not. It usually takes fifteen minutes.

It can be that short because the answers determine everything downstream: how many visits, whether aerial earns its place, whether you need a walkthrough or a campaign. A vague brief does not produce a cheaper film. It produces a quote with more assumptions in it, which is the same thing as a quote you cannot compare with anyone else's.

The four things to sort out before the recce

These are the items that delay commercial shoots, and every one of them is solvable a fortnight ahead and painful on the morning.

Access, and who actually grants it. On a completed building it is the building or facilities manager. On a site still in construction it is the main contractor, and their programme wins. On an occupied building it is both, plus whatever notice the tenants are owed. Find out early which of those apply, because on a live site the answer determines the date more than your calendar does.

Airspace. Aerial is worth having when the argument is about context, connectivity or scale, and it is dead weight when it is not. Where it is worth having, drone work in a built-up area needs permissions and planning, sometimes takes lead time, and occasionally the answer is no. Ask about it at the scoping stage rather than the week before.

Who can appear, and who signs off. Interviews are the difference between a film that argues and a film that decorates — the architect, the development director, the letting agent. Every one of those people needs an hour in a diary and, usually, someone's permission. The same applies to whether the client, the contractor or the occupier can be named. It is a five-minute internal question that stops a film in its tracks if it is asked after the edit.

What "finished" means. Deliverables, not adjectives. How many cuts, what shapes, whether stills are included, how many rounds of revisions, what you are allowed to use the material for and for how long. Which brings us to the quote.

What actually moves the price

Scope, not length. This is the single most common misunderstanding in the first conversation: a ninety-second film and a three-minute film cost roughly the same to make if the shoot behind them is the same shoot.

What moves the number is how much is being made and how hard it is to make: how many deliverables come out of it, how many locations or floors, how many days on site, whether interviews and aerial are involved, how fast you need it, and how many visits the scheme needs across its programme. A single launch film, a scheme campaign with a walkthrough and social cuts, and a two-year pre-launch programme are three different commitments, and no single day rate describes all three.

We publish three commercial tiers — Essential, Signature and Flagship — so you can see the shape of each before any figure enters the conversation, and what is in each tier is set out in full. If you want a number against your own scheme, the quote builder asks about location, scale and deliverables and comes back usually the same day.

How to compare two quotes fairly

If you have three proposals on your desk and they are within a similar range, the difference is almost never the camera. Read for these instead:

• Deliverable count and format. Vertical cuts made for the platform, or a landscape film cropped and hoped for the best. They are not the same product and one of them performs.
• Revisions. Two rounds included, or two rounds invoiced. Ours are built into the process rather than treated as a favour.
• Turnaround, stated in working days. Ours is ten for most commercial projects, fifteen for larger campaign films.
• Usage. What you can do with the material, for how long, and whether the agent can push it out through their own channels — which is where a lot of the value on a letting campaign actually comes from.
• Stills. Whether photography is shot on the same visit or is a second attendance and a second invoice.

What the day itself looks like

For most commercial schemes it is one day on site, preceded by a recce that decides everything about it — access windows, contractor coordination, permits, and which floors and hours give the building its best light.

We film around the building rather than shutting it down. On an occupied asset that means working with tenants in shot or scheduled around, and the practical cost to your team is a briefing and an escort, not a closure. On a construction site it means inductions, PPE and RAMS, and shoot days that fit the contractor's programme rather than cutting across it. Then ten working days to the edit, two rounds of revisions, and delivery.

Most commercial schemes go from first call to delivered film inside a month.

One decision that is worth making early

If the building is still being built, the single highest-value choice available to you is not which production company to use. It is when to start.

The states of a building that are most worth filming — an open floorplate, exposed structure on a retrofit, the view from a floor with no glass in it yet — stop existing on a schedule nobody controls, and there is no reshoot on a construction programme. If your scheme completes in the next six to eighteen months, that conversation is worth having now rather than at handover. We have written up how filming across a build actually runs, and what six visits to one Soho refurbishment produced for Hines at Film House.

If the building is finished and the deadline is the letting, that is a different and much shorter conversation, and it is the one most of our commercial property work in London starts with. Outside London, the same work runs from our Altrincham base across Manchester and the North West.

On what goes into the film once the commissioning is settled, we have written that up separately: what to include in a development film.

Have a scheme and a deadline?

Send us the building, the completion or launch date and who it has to persuade. We will tell you what is worth filming, what is not, and what it costs.

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