Questions
Questions clients actually ask
Real questions from real projects, answered plainly. For the numbers in full, see what a film costs.
What does a film cost?
Most films here are shot in a single day and land between £2,500 and £6,500 all in, depending on the size of the crew and what the edit needs. The full picture, including what moves a budget up or down, is in the budget guide.
What’s the least a film can cost?
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.
How long does a film run?
Most finished films run between one and three minutes, typically around a minute and a half. Cutdowns for social run 15 to 30 seconds. They’re short on purpose: each film is built to do one job.
How much of our time does filming take?
Most films need one shoot day. A small crew, a light footprint, and we work around your business, not the other way round. When someone’s availability or a location forces a second day, we’ll tell you exactly what that changes in the budget before anything is booked.
How quickly can this happen?
When diaries align, quickly: cameras can roll as early as a week after you confirm, and we’ve gone from first conversation to shoot day in two weeks. Tell us your deadline and we’ll tell you plainly whether it’s possible.
Where do you film?
The studio is based in London and films across the UK and Europe. Your premises, a location, or straight to the edit if the footage already exists. We quote in pounds, euros or dollars.
We’re not in the UK. Can we still work together?
Yes, in both directions. If you’re in Europe, we come to you: we film across the UK and Europe as standard. And we’ve produced shoots in the UK for companies based in the US, handled the paperwork their accounting departments need, and patched live camera and sound into a video call so a team eight time zones away could watch the shoot as it happened.
What do we receive at the end?
The finished film, plus the versions you need for web, social and screen: different lengths, different formats, subtitles burned in and as a separate file. If your film is headed somewhere particular, a trade show wall, a cinema screen, tell us and we’ll deliver for it.
Do we get the raw footage?
Yes. 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.
Who owns the film?
You do. The copyright in the finished film is yours, to use anywhere, forever: your website, social, paid campaigns, events, wherever it works, with no time limit and no restrictions on reworking it. We keep the right to show the work on acaluma.com, in our reels and in proposals, and if your project has a launch date or is internal only, tell us and we’ll hold it back accordingly.
What about music?
Every film includes properly licensed music: worldwide, on any platform, paid campaigns and TV included, with no expiry for the film as delivered. One nuance: the licence covers the film, not the music files themselves. If you re-cut the film in-house and want the same track in something new, tell us and we’ll sort the licensing properly.
Can we have subtitles in another language?
Yes. Other languages run £100 per minute of film, translation included. It costs more than translation alone because it is more than translation: different languages breathe in different places, so the timing and the line breaks get rebuilt, not just the words.
How many revisions are included?
A round or two is part of every film. Case studies often need more, because more people have to approve them, and we plan for that. Small tweaks stay small: they don’t turn into extra invoices.
What if extra costs come up during production?
Nothing gets spent without your agreement. If something extra comes up, we bring it to you first, with the number, before it’s incurred.
How does payment work?
Half the budget is due on booking when there’s a shoot involved. The balance is due 30 days after delivery. Prices are the full amount you pay: acalumaFILMS is not currently VAT registered, so nothing gets added on top.
Do you take on editing by itself?
Yes. Editing and grading are 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.
Who will we be working with?
acalumaFILMS is the studio of producer and director Massimo Amici, and it takes one project at a time, by design. Depending on the film, a small crew joins: camera, sound, hair and makeup, whoever the film needs and nobody it doesn’t.
What’s the first step?
The brief can be one line. Tell us which of our films felt like yours, and a little about what you make. We’ll take it from there.
mail@acaluma.com