What a production company needs to quote your project

It is the most common call we get: someone wants a film and asks what it costs. The honest answer — "it depends" — sounds evasive, and it is not: a production has no catalogue price because it is not a product, it is a scope. This is what turns that "it depends" into a number, and why giving it up front helps you more than it helps the studio.

Why won't they quote you over the phone?

Because the same brief can cost three different amounts depending on things nobody has asked yet. "A product video" can be one tabletop day on a stage or a shoot with talent across three locations. Same words, nothing alike in the budget.

A number given blind also has a worse flaw than being imprecise: it is almost always low. You estimate what you pictured, the real details arrive, and the figure climbs. Nobody enjoys that conversation. Which is why a serious studio would rather ask five questions before naming a number than after.

The five things that set your quote

• 01What is being produced. Advertising spot, digital content, corporate video, campaign photography, or a combination. It sets the crew, the days and the kind of post.
• 02What it is for. Launching a product, performance selling, brand positioning, internal communication or covering an event. The objective changes the treatment as much as the format does: a film built to sell and one built to explain are not shot the same way.
• 03Where it will live. Television, social, point of sale, website, paid campaigns. Channels determine versions, durations and aspect ratios, and that list is usually the last thing discussed and the first thing that inflates a quote.
• 04When you need it. A real date, even an approximate one. The calendar decides whether something is solved with normal production or a compressed day, and those do not cost the same.
• 05What you can invest. The range, not the exact figure. It is the single piece of information that saves the most time on both sides.

Why sharing your budget does not raise the price

This is the most common objection and it deserves a straight answer: people withhold the budget fearing the quote will stretch to fill it. In practice the opposite happens.

With a range on the table, the studio designs the production for that range: how many days, how many locations, what gets solved on a stage so the piece fits. Without one, it quotes the version it imagined, which might be twice what you had in mind — and then a week goes into cutting it back — or half, and then you get less than you could have had.

Put shortly: the budget is not what the studio is going to charge you, it is the constraint it will design against. And a clear constraint always produces better decisions than a blind one.

What you do NOT need to have figured out

Plenty of people delay the call believing they need to arrive with everything settled. You do not. No script, no storyboard, no locations, no casting, no view on how many versions you will want: that is exactly what pre-production defines and, in large part, what you are hiring.

You do not need the creative idea solved either. You can arrive with a developed concept and ask only for execution, or arrive with a business objective and build the idea together. Both are normal and they are quoted differently, so it is worth saying which one you are.

What a brief that actually works looks like

It does not need to be a document. These two sentences are enough to quote: "We are launching a footwear line in October. We need a hero film for social plus its vertical cutdowns, and stills for the catalogue. The campaign lives on Instagram and TikTok, the stills on our ecommerce. We need approved material in the first week of October. We are thinking of a range of X to Y."

All five are there: what, what for, where, when and how much. With that a studio can propose a concrete scope instead of a generic range, and the conversation starts on second base.

What happens after you send the brief

At ZerezoFilms we reply within 24 hours. That first reply is not always the quote: usually it is a couple of questions to close the scope, because pricing a misunderstood scope helps nobody. Once that is settled, the estimate arrives with its delivery calendar.

If you would rather not write a brief from scratch, the site's project assistant asks these questions in order and takes a couple of minutes. And if you already know which service you need, go straight to advertising spots, digital content, corporate video or campaign photography, where each explains what it includes and how long it takes.