How to choose a video production company

Everyone shows you a showreel. Thirty seconds, the best four frames of the best six jobs, scored to something with a drop in it. It is genuinely useful for judging whether a studio has taste. It is close to useless for judging whether they will deliver for you.

These are the questions that tell you the rest, and they work on any studio in any city, including this one.

Ask to see everything, not the reel

A showreel is a highlight cut by definition. What it cannot tell you is the floor. You want to know what an ordinary job looks like when the client was difficult, the budget was normal and the product was not photogenic, because that is the job you are about to commission.

Ask for the last ten pieces they delivered, in order, not the best ten.

Watch how a studio reacts to that request. It is a fair question and a confident studio answers it easily. Ours is answered permanently: every piece we have made for a client is public on the portfolio page, start to finish, short form and long form, rather than cut into a trailer.

Ask who is actually on your account

The most common gap between the pitch and the work is the people. You meet the founder or the creative director, you like them, you sign, and the work is then done by whoever was free. That is not automatically bad, but you should know before you sign rather than in week three.

• Who writes the concept, and is that the person in this meeting?
• Who is physically on set, and how senior are they?
• Who cuts it, and how many other accounts do they carry at the same time?
• Who do I message on a Tuesday when something is wrong?

A studio that gives you four straight names is running a real process. A studio that answers in the abstract about “the team” is telling you the answer changes week to week.

Ask what happens after it is posted

This is the question that separates a production house from a content partner, and it is the one almost nobody asks.

Most studios finish at delivery. The file lands in your inbox and the relationship pauses until you commission the next one. Nothing is wrong with that if a finished film is what you need. But if what you actually need is a feed that performs, somebody has to read what happened and let it change what gets made next.

Worth asking directly

• Do you look at how the piece performed, and does it change the next one?
• Do you deliver a version built to run as a paid ad, or only the organic cut?
• Do I get the vertical and horizontal versions, or one and a crop?
• Do I get the raw files?

That last one matters more than it sounds. Raw files are the difference between changing studios and starting again.

Ask specifically about the ad version

A piece that works organically usually fails as an ad, because the two are watched by different people in different states of mind. An organic viewer already followed you. An ad viewer is a stranger who did not ask, and the opening has to earn them in about two seconds or the money is gone.

Almost nobody includes the recut. If you intend to put spend behind anything, ask whether the ad version is in scope before you agree a price, because adding it afterwards is a second negotiation from a weaker position. We go into what that does to a quote in what video production actually costs.

The signals that should slow you down

• A quote before any questions. Nobody can price this job without knowing what footage exists and whether anyone is shooting.
• A portfolio with no client names. Sometimes there is a real confidentiality reason. Usually there is not.
• Guaranteed views or followers. Nobody can promise that, and anyone who does is either buying the numbers or has not been doing this long.
• Unlimited revisions. This reads as generous and functions as a warning. It usually means the concept stage is weak and everyone expects to fix it later.
• No written scope. If the deliverables are not listed, the argument about what was included is scheduled, not avoided.

One test that costs almost nothing

Before committing to a retainer, buy one piece. A single video, paid for properly, tells you more about a studio than any number of calls: whether they ask good questions, whether the concept is theirs or yours, whether it arrives when they said, and whether the thing is actually good.

We built our first step around exactly that, because it is the sensible way to buy this. One custom reel for your brand in seven days, credited in full against your first month if you carry on. The detail is on the content offer page.

And if you want to see how often we can do it before you spend anything, that is what the full portfolio is for. It is also worth reading how many reels a brand actually needs in a month before you agree to any retainer, because the volume in the proposal should match a number you can hold.