Cheesy title aside, this should be a pretty useful short-guide to working with us. Although some clients have their own particular way of working with a provider, a lot of our customers don’t know where to start…

How long is a piece of string?
Usually it begins with ‘We really want a cool promo-video for our website – how much would that cost?’ or something similar. The answer to that would be ‘how long is a piece of string?’. It’s relative to how long it takes us to create…what style are you looking for? Obviously, some styles take a lot more time to produce – for example: explaining a service using our Handcrafted style takes a lot less time to produce than creating a photo-realistic 3D commercial would. Do you have a duration in mind? Some clients come to us with an exact duration, like 30 seconds and others ask for an approximate running time, more often than not, 2-3 minutes.

Extras
What else do you need? All too often we’ll be tasked to create a video of around 2-3 minutes and then after everything has been agreed upon and the video has been delivered, we’re asked ‘where’s the website that it goes on?’ or ‘right, now we need it reworking to include completely different colours and logos’ or ‘why is it not in HD’? We will ask you a set of questions at the start of a project. You will need to answer what you can and add any additional requests. We don’t mind doing extra work such as creating alternate versions, or changing the text and voice-over to another language but unless this was agreed upon and was part of the quote we gave you, it’ll cost you extra. Another issue that comes up is flash video players and controls. Unless you’ve asked for it, we’re simply creating the video content. We can create custom flash video players on request. Or alternatively, if you’re planning to host the video on a sharing site such as youtube, vimeo or blip, after uploading the video file you can copy and paste the embed code into your web page and a player & controls will be included. Most video sharing sites will allow you to customize the player and controls to match your colours and branding.

‘Erm, I just want a video…y’know, like other intarweb sites have’
If you’re not sure what style to go with or what size the video should be, where you’re hosting it or how long the duration should be…just ask us to sort it out for you. We’re more than happy to look at what you need, check out your business or service and figure out what would best suit you. We don’t expect you to know all about video production.

The creative process
We start by scripting (unless you’ve provided a script). We’ll generally run this by you a few times before really nailing it. I said above, ‘We don’t expect you to know all about video production’…well, the reverse is also true. We won’t understand your business as well as you do…so we prefer to work closely with you on the script. This doesn’t mean that you do most of the work. We create a whole script and send it to you, we just want you to check the terminology and to make sure that it gets over your message the way you want it to.

We then brainstorm for visuals, gimmicks and animation ideas, then throw these ideas your way for you to check out as well to make sure we’re getting it just right.

With the script and visuals finished, we send the script off to be recorded by one of our vocal talents. With access to around 100 voice-over artists, you can tell us roughly what kind of narration style you have in mind, and we’ll sort that out for you.

We supply royalty-free music. We’ll suggest a few tracks but if you have a different style in mind, let us know and we’ll begin a search and send you some samples.

Then we start animating/filming. At this stage we create a client page for you on our website and upload clips, stills and audio for you to review to make sure you’re happy with how things are going. We figure that it’s much better for you to be able to give feedback as we work rather than after we’ve finished. It saves us both a lot of time.

Payments & Delivery
Before we start work on your video, we require a 50% up front payment. This is non-refundable once work has begun, however, if the 50% has been paid and we have not yet started work, we will refund the payment should you cancel the booking (minus any handling fees than were incurred eg. PayPal fees). Once the project is finished, we will upload a watermarked version of the video for your review. Should you approve the video and not need any further work, we will deliver the files to you once the remaining 50% and any additional costs (see extras above) are paid in full.

Business Relationships…
We have some strong core values when it comes to business. We think that businesses should help each other out…that they should be loyal to their customers and suppliers and that it isn’t always about dollars, pounds or euros. Sure, we’re in business to make money, who isn’t? But it’s certainly isn’t everything.

We’re in this business because we love what we do. We love being creative and have an unhealthy obsession with video…we chose to do this. But we also got a lot of help along the way. We had a helping hand from a lot of people at Durham University. We’ve had several customers that have really helped us out and have thrown as much work as possible at us, even coming up with new concepts to create more income for us. It’s a two-way street. We don’t over-charge…we help them reach ridiculous deadlines and where possible, promote our clients by word of mouth, on message boards and social media – Twitter, Facebook etc.

We’re happy with one-time customers or one-off projects but we’re all about forming relationships with our clients. Some of our clients have become long-time friends over the years. We feel this is the best possible way to work.

The Bottom Line:
Whatever you do, don’t worry about having your video made, you’ll be paying us to do the worrying for you…and if there’s something you’re not sure about, a technical term that you don’t understand or something you’re not sure we can do, just ask us – we’re always happy to guide you through the process.