What Drives the Cost of a Proof of Concept Film

Search for the price of a proof of concept film and you will find either silence or a range so wide it tells you nothing. Both are honest, in a way, because the format has no standard unit. A ninety second film can be a straightforward job or the hardest thing a studio does that year, and nothing about the runtime tells you which.

What is useful is knowing which inputs move the number, so that when you get two quotes that differ wildly you can tell whether you are looking at two prices or at two different films.

The inputs that move it most

• Number of distinct setups. Not runtime. A ninety second film with three locations, three lighting conditions and three times of day is a much larger job than a three minute film in one place.
• Identity difficulty. Whether a specific face, a specific product or a specific piece of architecture has to remain exactly itself across every shot. This is the single most underestimated driver.
• Whether the world exists. A contemporary interior is one problem. A period, a future or an invented ecology is another, because everything in frame has to be decided rather than found.
• Performance demand. A held look is cheap. A scene where a specific emotion has to read and then change is not.
• Sound. Whether you need designed sound, original score, voice, or all three, and whether voice must belong to a specific person.
• Rights and usage. Private pitch use, public release, paid media, territory and duration. This can change the number more than any creative choice.

The inputs that move it less than people expect

Runtime, within reason. Resolution, in most cases, since the deliverable is usually watched on a laptop. And the number of revisions, which sounds like a cost lever but is really a symptom: a project with many revision rounds usually had a weak brief, and the brief is the cheap thing to fix.

The deadline is a real line item

A date is not a preference. If the film has to be ready for a market, a festival meeting, a board date or an option expiry, the schedule stops being negotiable, and everything that would normally be sequenced has to run in parallel. That is a genuine cost, and any studio that does not raise it is either not planning to hit the date or has not thought about it.

What a quote should contain

You should be able to read a proposal and know what happens before anything is generated or shot. If the document goes straight from brief to delivery, you are being quoted for an output, not for a process, and the risk of the thing arriving wrong sits entirely with you.

• What is delivered before production: treatment, storyboard, and something that demonstrates rhythm rather than only framing.
• How many rounds of change are included and at which stages, because a change after picture lock is a different animal from a change at board stage.
• Who owns what at the end, and what you are licensed to do with it.
• What is explicitly not included.

On market figures

There are published ranges circulating for pitch films, sizzles and concept trailers. They are market references and nothing more. They describe what some buyers have paid in some contexts, and they are not a quote, ours or anyone else's.

We price commercially, project by project, based on the inputs above. We do not publish a rate card, and we would treat any studio that publishes a fixed price for this format with some curiosity, because it implies the work does not vary, and it does.

The cheapest thing you can do

Get the diagnosis right before you commission. The most expensive proof of concept is the one that was well made and aimed at the wrong doubt, because there is no revision round that fixes it. You do not re edit your way out of proving the wrong thing. You start again.

An hour spent deciding what the film must prove is worth more than any line item you will negotiate afterwards.

The stages we quote against are laid out on the proof of concept page.

There is no price for a proof of concept, only inputs: setups, identity difficulty, whether the world exists, performance demand, sound, rights and deadline. The most expensive film is the well made one that aimed at the wrong doubt.