You know your clients are researching you long before they pick up the phone. You also know what happens if you get it wrong.
The compliance trap. “If we say the wrong thing there are consequences. It takes four weeks to get a sixty-second script approved. It’s not worth the argument.”
The resource trap. “Nobody here has time. And even if they did, we don’t have the kit, the lighting, or anyone who knows how to grade a picture.”
The reputation trap. “I’ve spent twenty years building this. I’m not putting something amateur next to my name to find out it doesn’t work.”
So nothing gets made. And you stay the best-kept secret in your market while louder, less qualified people take the enquiries.
Let’s save you some time. If you’re after any of this, we’re the wrong people.
Not a content agency turning out clips by volume. You get a small number of videos, each built to do one specific job — so your money goes into something still working in a year, not posts that vanished by Thursday.
Not a videographer who delivers footage and disappears. Every engagement ends with the video published, not with a file transfer. Which means it actually exists, instead of sitting in a folder waiting for a free weekend that never comes.
Not an influencer outfit. No trending audio, no reality-TV energy, no pretending to be 26. You look like the person your client will meet — so the first conversation starts from trust rather than a correction.
Not a YouTube growth service. We optimise for the one viewer who becomes a client, not for a subscriber count.
Not a mindset or confidence course. Nerves on camera are a structural problem — script, pacing, direction — and we treat them the way broadcasters treat a first-time contributor.
| What it is | You end up with | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
The Pilot |
One day. A proof of concept before you commit to anything ongoing |
One published cornerstone video, three social cuts, a written message plan |
£2,450 or £4,950 + VAT |
|
The Authority Engine |
A monthly video system your own team runs, with us on the strategy |
Four scripts, two directed sessions and four editor briefs, every month |
£3,000/month + VAT |
|
Full production |
A standalone project. Full crew, full kit, full pre-production |
A year of material from one properly planned day |
From £12,000 ex VAT |
We film it — £4,950 + VAT. Full three-person crew, two cameras, one day on site. Travel, accommodation and any location costs sit outside that figure — you’ll see the full picture in writing before anyone presses go. No surprises on the invoice.
You film it, we direct — £2,450 + VAT. Same scripting, same direction, same edit. You use the camera you already own and we run the session live over Teams.
If you go on to a retainer within 60 days, the Pilot fee comes off your first month.
One day. One cornerstone video, three social cuts, and a strategy you keep whether or not we ever work together again.
Most firms know they should be doing this and can’t justify a twelve-month commitment to something unproven. So don’t. Prove it on one asset first.
You finish the fortnight with:
What it costs you in time: about two hours a month. You film. That’s it.
Editing is billed directly by your editor, not by us. Their rates don’t get marked up, and when you want five versions instead of two, you’re deciding on a number you can see. If you don’t have an editor, we’ll introduce you to one and write their brief. You contract them, not us.
No minimum term. At month three we’ll tell you what the numbers say. If it isn’t working, we’ll say so.
Prefer us to do the filming as well? Full production retainers are scoped individually — the cost depends on how many shoot days a year you need and where they are. Ask and we’ll price it.
You don’t need a video agency. You need someone who knows what to say, how to say it, and how to get it signed off — and who then gets out of the way so your team can produce it.
Every month:
Most production companies will film you for a day and hand back one video. We think that’s a waste of a day and a waste of your money.
The single biggest cost in any shoot is getting a crew, kit and lighting into a room and out again. Once we’re there, the marginal cost of the fourth interview is close to nothing — an hour of the day and another card in the bag. So we plan the day around what you’ll need for the next twelve months, not around one video.
What a well-planned day actually produces
Four interviews, filmed properly, with the lighting and sound built once and re-dressed between setups. From that:
| The asset | What it does |
|---|---|
|
Founder story |
Makes a stranger trust you before the first call |
|
About us |
Sits on your homepage and does the explaining |
|
Meet the team |
Answers “who will I actually be dealing with” |
|
Pitch film |
Carries the story, so your people are free to answer questions |
|
Social cuts |
Pulled from the same material, not filmed separately |
This is what Pabulum Catering did. One day at a partner school. Three separate films from that day’s material — a pitch film, a website version and an internal comms piece. The pitch film won a £300,000 contract on its first outing.
Every project is scoped individually, and we mean it. A founder story shot in one office is not the same job as a multi-site brand film with a location scout and three days of post. £12,000 is the floor, not a package. We’ll tell you what your day should cost once we know what you need out of it — and if the honest answer is that you need less than that, we’ll say so.
Before we quote, you get a written plan for the day: the list of assets it produces and what each one is for. No obligation. If you take that plan to somebody else, that’s your prerogative.
If you’re not sure a project this size is the right call yet, it probably isn’t. Start with the Pilot.
Every regulated or reputation-sensitive business has a line it can’t cross. For financial firms it’s the FCA. For clinics it’s the ASA and JCCP. The rules differ. The method doesn’t.
We don’t turn a camera on until we know the safe ground. We build content around education and philosophy, and stay well clear of the things that need a regulator’s attention — financial promotions, treatment claims, before-and-after imagery.
Stop sending compliance one script at a time. We write in quarterly batches. Your compliance officer, or your professional body’s guidance, gets applied to the text before a camera comes out of the bag. Once the words are agreed, the risk is gone.
Risk warnings, qualifications, end-card disclosures — built into the edit as standard, not remembered afterwards. You never have to hope somebody caught it in post.
Most of what a production costs has nothing to do with what you see. Crew standing around. Kit hired for a day and used for an hour. Locations booked because that’s how it’s always been done.
We’ve spent 28+ years inside that machinery and we know which parts of it you actually need. So when a budget won’t stretch to the obvious way of doing something, we design a different way rather than telling you it can’t be done.
Incuhive needed a year-long documentary. Low-carbon fertiliser trials, important to the local farming community, and quotes coming back at £15,000 to £20,000. Done conventionally, that’s what it costs. So we didn’t do it conventionally. We built them a filming kit, trained their own team to shoot it, guided the story over twelve months, then edited their footage into a broadcast-standard fourteen-minute film. It came in at around £4,000, and it got used with councils, farmers and stakeholders.
John Deere needed four cinematic product films. Commissioned through Blue Marlin for the US market. Four films the conventional way is roughly £600,000 — around £150,000 each. One of the products didn’t even have signed-off packaging yet.
So we didn’t shoot a frame. We went through John Deere’s own archive — years of properly funded footage sitting unused — catalogued what could be salvaged, and enhanced it with AI so it stood up on a modern screen. The product packs were built in 3D rather than shot in a studio. New material was commissioned carefully and only where it was needed, so the finished films felt new rather than recycled. When the client changed a packaging colour halfway through, it cost a remodel instead of a reshoot — about £15,000 saved on that decision alone.
Four films. No location shoot. Production values intact.
That’s the thinking you’re buying. Not a crew and a camera — a producer who knows where the money is going and whether it needs to.
|
28+ years |
Broadcast television — BBC, ITV, Channel 4, NBC, Netflix |
|
RTS award winner |
Craft & Design Awards 2018, Multicamera Work, as part of the camera team on The Royal Wedding: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle for BBC One |
|
Credits include |
Strictly Come Dancing, Britain’s Got Talent, The Piano (BAFTA-nominated), and concert films for Deep Purple, Alice Cooper and Bring Me The Horizon |
You don’t have to take my word for any of it. It’s all on IMDb.
A Glasgow aesthetics training business filling £897 courses. We built a filming system their team runs themselves: we write the scripts and direct the sessions, they shoot, we brief the editor. Video now brings in three to four course bookings a month through Instagram — somewhere in the region of £3,000 a month added to the bottom line. We have not been on site once.
A 529-video YouTube channel that had stopped working. Click-through rate had fallen year on year, from 3.34% to 2.56%. We rewrote titles, descriptions and thumbnails on twenty of them. No filming. No new content.
Seventy-three days later the channel’s click-through rate is 3.2%, five of the twenty are above the 5% target, and those twenty are averaging 3.3 times the channel’s long-form baseline — from content that had been generating almost nothing for years.
The other 509 are still there.
Pitch hit rate falling. One day’s filming at a partner school, three films out of it — pitch, website and internal comms. The pitch film won a £300,000 contract on its first outing.
From around 40 views on a static post to 200–1,000 impressions on a weekly video — produced by the client herself, in under an hour.
We make video for businesses that sell on trust, and we teach those same businesses to make it themselves when that’s the better answer. Three routes: a one-day pilot, a monthly system your team runs with us on strategy, or full broadcast production.
A director of photography with 28+ years in UK broadcast television — BBC, ITV, Channel 4, NBC and Netflix. Credits include Strictly Come Dancing, Britain’s Got Talent, and the BAFTA-nominated The Piano, plus concert films for Deep Purple, Alice Cooper and Bring Me The Horizon. He was part of the camera team that won the RTS Craft & Design Award for Multicamera Work on the 2018 Royal Wedding for BBC One.
Sometimes, by changing how the production works rather than by cutting quality. Incuhive got a fourteen-minute broadcast-standard documentary for around £4,000 against £15,000–20,000 quotes, because their own team did the filming and we handled the structure and the edit. If there’s a workflow that gets you the result for less, we’ll tell you about it.
The Pilot is £2,450 + VAT if you film and we direct, or £4,950 + VAT if we bring a crew. The Authority Engine is £3,000 a month + VAT. Standalone production starts at £12,000 ex VAT. Full production retainers are scoped individually.
For the Engine and the Pilot, yes — you or someone from your team. That’s the point: people trust a person, not a brand. We direct you through it. For full production we can build a film around interviews, archive and graphics if being on camera genuinely isn’t an option.
Yes. Compliance is built into the workflow rather than bolted on afterwards — scripts approved as text before anything is filmed. That applies equally to FCA-regulated firms and to clinics working within ASA rules and JCCP guidance.
Six to twelve months before meaningful enquiry flow. That isn’t a flaw, it’s how trust works. You’ll have published videos much sooner than that — the first one inside a fortnight — but the enquiries take time.
The Engine is delivered over Teams and works anywhere. Full production depends on where you are; ask.
Good. We work alongside them, not instead of them. They set the strategy and the brand; we handle direction, scripting and the technical execution they don’t have time for.
Take the scorecard. It’s two minutes, it’s a quiz rather than a call, and it’ll tell you which of the three routes fits — or that none of them do.
