Video Production Services

So you want Casual Films to make a film for you?

Congratulations, what a brilliant decision! You’re obviously highly intelligent, but even someone as smart as you could be forgiven for thinking, “isn’t film production quite complicated?”

Yes, a bit, but we’re going to make the process easy or dare I say casual for you.

Before we begin, it would be good to explain that the process of making each film is slightly different and so you may find that we don’t do everything mentioned here for every production.

The process has three stages: pre-production, production, and postproduction.

Pre-production is where we plan and organise everything.

This starts with you telling us what you want in a document called an ‘edit brief’ and then probably an initial meeting to go through this.

If you have a storyboard or script that’s great, if not we’ll get our writers to come up with a few ideas and then a script for you. This goes through a few drafts to get it just right. We then move to the next stage, which is storyboarding. This will give you an idea of the composition of the film. You will also be able to have a look at how the film will, well, look.

If required, we’ll find some fantastic actors to be in your film. We have a large pool of talent we can call on. You may just want your own staff to feature, talking about how great your company is. This can be very effective and our team have experience of eeking out confident performances from even timid backroom staff.

Production is where we do the recording.

Most of our films are shot with a crew of two – a camera operator/director and camera assistant/sound recordist. We include a standard lighting set-up with our film packages, this is suitable for 90% of applications and it’s easy to add anything extra if required.

We can also use exciting pieces of equipment like dollies and jib cranes. These allow for fancy moving camera shots that make the film look just that bit sexier. We may also want to arrange for specialised equipment: helicopters and pyrotechnics for example, although these are not always necessary.

Location sound is usually recorded straight into the camera, through directional and remote, radio microphones. We record voiceover audio separately, using high-quality condenser microphones in a soundproofed studio.

Post-production is where we put it all together.

For animated and live-action pieces this is slightly different…

Live-action editing takes roughly a day for every minute of film. We’ll compile a ‘rough cut’ for your feedback. As it’s a rough cut, it will look… rough, so don’t freak out. 80% of the polishing is done in the last 20% of the production time. With your feedback, we’ll produce the second (slightly less) rough cut. This process continues until we have a finished film we are all happy with.

Animation takes a bit more time at around three to 20 seconds per animator per day. This is more variable because it depends on the complexity of what you want.

We begin by showing you two initial elements: the style and the content cut. The style is how the finished film will look. The content cut will give you a chance to hear the audio content of the film. It’s important to sign these off before we proceed as animator time costs money and amends to these elements can be very time consuming at a later stage.

The animator then works through the storyboard, timing their work to the content cut. Don’t worry there is still time for amends before the final sign-off.

Before the final delivery there is one more stage: colour grading. This is where a very skilled chap (or chappess) tweaks the colours to give your film just the right stylistic feel. It’s this stage that the film finally looks its very best.

Getting the right music and properly mastered sound, can make all the difference to the viewing experience of a film. If you want a commercial song on your film (that one by Mumford and Sons you just can’t stop humming, for example) we can purchase the rights for you. This can be very costly, so you might prefer to have our music team compose something bespoke for you.

If you don’t have the budget for that, no problem, with your help we’ll find the just the right track from our extensive royalty free library. Then our sound designers may add in a few sound effects as a final audio cherry on top before making sure all the levels are just right (known as mastering).

Once these processes are finished and we’re all happy and signed-off, we prepare the video for delivery. This starts by encoding the raw footage out of the production software and into the format you require. We can do this to almost any format you could possibly want. For the Internet we usually use Quicktime, Flash or Windows Media Video.

We then all sit back and watch your precision packed message enlighten audiences wherever you show it, on a specially designed microsite for example. We can help you with that too…