Budgets

What a film costs

There are no packages here, and no menus. Every film is budgeted from scratch, because every business needs a different film. But “it depends” is not a useful answer when you’re planning, so here is how the numbers actually work.

The shape of a budget

A film has three parts: the preparation, the shoot, and the post production.

Preparation usually runs £500 to £1,000. Case studies need a little more of it than brand films: more people to schedule, more voices to align before the shoot. Advertisements need the most, because locations have to be found and approved, actors cast, and a script written and signed off.

A shoot day runs £1,000 to £3,000, depending on the size of the crew. A second day costs the same again: day rates are day rates, and the crew is booked for the day whether we use all of it or not.

Post production, meaning the edit, colour, sound, music and the versions you need, runs £1,000 to £2,500.

Put together, most films shot in a single day land between £2,500 and £6,500 all in.

What moves the number

Two things above all: people and time. A bigger crew and more shoot days grow a budget faster than anything else, and the costs compound, because every extra person also travels and eats. Filming beyond London adds cost, and so do actors. Music barely registers these days: good licensed music is close to free.

The best money in any budget goes to planning. A little more preparation often means a shorter shoot, and sometimes a single well planned day can capture what’s needed for more than one film.

What’s included

Every film includes the edit, licensed music, colour and sound. On most budgets it also includes a cutdown for social, a proper colour grade, and subtitles made by hand: timed correctly, broken where the language breathes, delivered burned in and as a separate file. Machine subtitles are fine for content built to be forgotten. For a film meant to last, they aren’t.

And the footage is yours. If you want everything we shot, you get it. Some production companies charge extra for that, or refuse it entirely. We don’t: footage you paid to shoot belongs to you.

The smaller additions

Subtitles in another language run £100 per minute of film, translation included, because good subtitling is never just translation: different languages breathe in different places. A set photographer for stills adds £500 for the day, plus £300 for selection and finishing. Motion graphics or animation, where a film calls for them, usually add around £1,000.

Extra versions are cheapest to decide before the edit, because the edit gets built around them. Coming back to archived footage later always costs more.

An advertisement built like film can often be made with the same small crew as everything else here. When a spot genuinely needs a bigger one, crew rates follow the industry’s standard terms (the APA’s), and the budget grows accordingly. Either way it starts with a script, and the script is the cheapest part of the film to change.

Editing only

Editing and grading are also available as their own job. For most projects a set fee works best: as a reference, editing a case study shot in one day typically runs £1,000 to £1,200, including a couple of revisions, grade, sound mix and licensed music. For ongoing tweaks, an hourly arrangement at £100 works well.

The small print

Half the budget is due on booking when there’s a shoot involved. The balance is due 30 days after delivery. Anything extra that comes up during production gets agreed with you before it’s spent. We work in pounds, euros and dollars.

Prices here are the full amount you pay. acalumaFILMS is not currently VAT registered, so nothing gets added on top.

Small budgets

Some films can be made very small: shot by one person, close to home, with a client who helps keep things simple. Done that way, a film can occasionally come together from around £1,500 to £2,000. Below that, a film usually isn’t the right answer, and we’ll say so.

Start here

The brief can be one line. Tell us what the film has to do, and roughly what you’d like to spend, and we’ll tell you what it buys.

mail@acaluma.com