Let us introduce ourselves and tell you a little bit more about who we are.
Jovan Co-Founded Square Daisy in 2011. He is a big fan of red wine and stilton cheese, and always has 'Pop Tarts' in his desk drawer (if you remember those). He only feels comfortable in smart casual attire and used to be the lead in a Serbian Folk Dancing Group for 15 years. If you ask him nicely, he'll show you the videos.
Amy is our Head of Production so she's the one responsible for all things video, but mostly specialising in animation. She loves her gymnastics and can do some pretty average moves on the box and the bars, however seems to leave most of the skin from her hands at the gymnastics club. She owns an unusual amount of mustard clothing, has an unparalleled love of cats and dogs and is without doubt, a future winner of the 'Great British Bake Off'.
Julie is our videographer and despite not breaking any records for 'Square Daisy's tallest employee', she handles the Canon C300 like a bodybuilder. That may well be because she is a trained Judo professional and could put us all on our backsides - don't be fooled, she is a serious martial arts expert! Not only that, but she is French, so now we all greet each other in the morning with a happy 'Bonjour'!
Your project should be all about you, not us, but it’s always helpful to find out a little more about who we are.
We are a professional video production company founded in 2011, so we have a great track record and excellent pedigree in what we do. All aspects of what we do are handled in-house by our brilliant team who are all on the payroll, not freelancers. We’re based in Redhill, Surrey, and while the majority of our work is in London and the South East, we regularly travel nationwide for our clients.
We have had the honour of working with some of the best known global brands, small start-ups and quite literally everything in between. We’ve filmed Presidents, world class surgeons, TV stars and even produced an animation for NATO to launch their transformation project.
Our industry is relatively easy for customers to figure out who they want to have a conversation with and who they don’t. All of our work is visual and available for you to look at and say “their work is great, we’d love to do something similar to that example there”. If you feel comfortable with the quality of the output, it then usually comes down to four elements which will decide whether you’d like to work with us or not – price, process, availability and whether you like us!
We believe it is so important to be transparent with pricing, so we keep things very simple. We charge £75.00 per hour + VAT whether we are filming, editing, animating, storyboarding or anything else, and then multiply this by the number of hours that your project will take. We get to this figure by having a detailed discussion with you about your needs and then put a formal proposal together, explaining the final output and a breakdown of each element of the project with the number of hours required for each. This way you can see clearly what you are paying for and where the time goes. We also work on a fixed fee, so as long as the specification for the production doesn’t alter, if we run over, you still pay what was originally quoted. From an invoicing perspective, we usually bill 50% up front and 50% when the project is signed off.
It won’t have escaped your attention that we haven’t given a price for ‘each video’ and that is because every video is very different. Is it filmed or is it animated, or is it a combination of both? How long is it, how many locations do we need to film at and how much footage is required? Are any animated sequences visually simplistic or do they require characters and complex environments? All of these aspects determine how much time is required on your project and in turn, the budget.
There are people out there that will do packages like the the “two minute video for £699” offer, but that’s just not us. We value quality and effectiveness over volume.
We have a full page on our site dedicated to our process, so we don’t need to labour the point too much here, but having a methodical process in place is absolutely critical in video production.
Let’s take live action, or a traditional filmed production, for example. There is a great deal of pre-production that is required before any actual filming has taken place. What is the purpose of the video, who is the audience, what are the key messages, are we filming people or general footage with on screen text and graphics overlaid? What does the final edit look like, how many versions do we need for different platforms, clients or countries? Who is being filmed, where are we filming them and do they have that time blocked out for the project? Are there any logistical challenges such as security access or parking. Without all of this information, time is wasted during the actual shoot trying to figure things out on the fly, which ultimately ends up leaving us with sub standard content and ultimately, a sub standard edit.
With animated content, it is even more important to ensure that a robust process is in place. The process of animation is really quite complex, so minimising the number of changes that are ever required once the animation process has taken place protects the budget. This is why script, storyboard and graphics all need approving before we start with the motion design, and why we have our seven stage process in place.
You can watch some short explainer videos on our process for both live action and animation here, as well as find out more detail on each stage.
There are times when clients need something very quickly and that’s okay. When this happens we can usually accommodate, but where possible it is always best to give time to the project so that there is ample opportunity to get feedback on various elements, such as scripting, storyboard, graphics and planning for a location shoot. There are occasions when it simply isn’t possible to deliver the work in the timeframe available though and in those circumstances, we can either suggest an alternative approach or we sadly have to be honest and say we can’t do the work.
Well what can we say about this part! We have been in operation for over ten years, have almost 100% 5 star Google reviews (one sneaky 4 star review to spoil the perfect record) and have had lots of repeat business, so without sounding too confident, I think we’re a pretty likeable bunch – but you’ll never know for sure until we speak, so why not send us a note and we’ll arrange a meeting so you can decide for yourselves!
If you've never worked on a video production before, find out more about the production process
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