That's all we ended up with?

The day begins at 8am. The crew it setting up cameras and getting the lighting ready. You sit for your interview and the audio tech fusses with your microphone forever. You’re eager to get started but it takes so long to set everything up. The crew is fussing over everything. After the interview, they stage some shots and it takes nearly all day to finish up the shoot.

Weeks later you receive the first draft of the edit. You sit down and it’s…3 minutes long?? It took all day to shoot where is all of that footage?

Video production is a craft that can be frustrating for novices. It would seem that you spend all day just to produce one 30 second commercial. This, however, is the very essence of a video production. Painters take hours, if not days to produce one small painting on a canvas and chefs spent hours mixing  

just the right amount of ingredients for a 1 ounce sauce. But remember, if that sauce makes the dish great, then it’s worth it.

To avoid any misconceptions about how much goes into your production, make sure you pay close attention to the pre-production process. This is where you will decide on your “deliverables”, the end video that you want to have. The more professional the production, the more time it will take to produce. When deciding to participate a production, be sure to schedule and entire day for production. Just because the commercial is only going to be 30 seconds long, it doesn’t mean that it will take only 30 seconds to make.