Pre-Production occurs over 2 phases:
1. Before the sale: the project brief, scope and payment – mainly handled by our Business Development Manager (BDM) using or customising our proposal templates. Sometimes our BDM will ask our Creative Director for input, especially for projects outside of our normal scope.
2. Project planning: this is all the planning and booking decisions made once a 50% down payment has been made by our client. Our Creative Director confirms and develops the concept with the client and plans and co-ordinates the whole process. This includes booking scripts, filming/animating and any extras eg studios, talent etc. As well as booking the production elements, our 1 Minute Media scripts (2-column) are produced in this phase.
The video production brief is the request clients make for a quote.
Some are simple and easily match our template/popular quotes.
Occassionally a client will make enquiries, but not know at all what type of video they’d like, so it will be important for our BDM to use the “scoping document” to help them choose some production elements.
Some clients provide very detailed and sometimes complex briefs. Our BDM may need to design a custom quote for them and they may need help from the Creative Director to design the custom quote.
The “Scoping Document” contains a list of questions that our BDM can use to help clients who are unsure of their video brief. The questions obtain a general idea of the objective(s) of the video(s), where it will be displayed and broad outline of the production elements likely to be needed. The scoping document is a guide, the BDM doesn’t need to ask all the questions eg if the client wants an animation video, the BDM doesn’t need to ask where filming will take place.
The “Scoping Document” is different to our “Concept Document” which is used by our Creative Director, to provide more detail and creative input at the commencement of the project.
We use a program called “Quotient App” for our client proposals/quotes.Â
Quotient offers the following advantages:
We use the best and most relevant of our 1 Minute Media produced samples to match the brief from our lead.
Our Sales Department has designed a Google form linking some of our most popular template Quotients.Â
We upgrade these often, as our team constantly strives to use new leading edge techniques.
When customising a quote from one of the templates, you can find more, often new samples on our Vimeo channel. The final versions of new videos can be found in the “Showcases” section of Vimeo, where they are placed across various categories such as video styles (eg animation) and corporate industries (eg healthcare)
A remittance advice is a receipt from our customer’s bank, to show they’ve paid their down payment or balance.
We ask our customer’s to send this so we know straight away to either start their project, or if it’s at the end of the production, to provide their final versions of their video(s). The reason is sometimes there’s a lag of funds arriving into our account or we haven’t noticed a payment.
The remittance advice let’s us know to keep the project moving immediately.
The BDM design’s the “Sales Handover” folder to provide all the pre-sales information they’ve gathered from the client for the Creative Director.Â
This includes: 1. The “Handover Form” (who, what, when etc) and 2. The “Initial Brief and Call/Email Notes” (these notes are kept by the BDM in Salesforce and copied to pro-formas found here.
Our Creative Director designs the Production Dashboard, from templates in Monday.com.
The Production Dashboard is used to collate all the information on each project including pre-production, production and post. Each section has checklists the Creative Director confirms with the client.Â
Monday.com is a production management program, it allows us to invite all relevant 1 Minute Media team members, and client stakeholders to one central place to streamline all information for each project.
Our Production Dashboard replaces good old pdf “runsheets”, that had to be upadated and resent individually to all the parties.Â
All parties on a dashboard get an alert when new info is added eg a change of filming date or time.
This is when 1 Minute Media provides a full 2-column script for our client from scratch.Â
The 2-columns are:Â
Our Creative Director confirms the concept from the client, and passes this to one of our script writers to develop the 2-column script.
In many cases our clients already have a good idea of what they want in their script. Often they have their own marketing department who want to try their own script.
In this case we give our client a template of our 2-column script (see full script for a description).
Once we receive the draft from the client our Creative Director decides whether the script needs to be reviewed, and estimates how long it will take. The Creative Director then instructs one of our script writers to complete a review/recommendations to the client’s draft.
No!
Sorry for the trick question. Smiley face.
The best way to learn about the production elements booked in pre-production, is to proceed to the next two glossary sections: Section C: Production & Section D: Post-Production.
