How to Budget Expenses for a Post-Production Project

Video Transcript

"TRAVIS JOHNS: Hi. I'm Travis Johns for Expert Village, and I want to talk to you about monetary budgeting with your home video post-production studio. Monetary budgeting is very important because that's the reason you're doing this all to begin with. You're trying to make money. So, when you start a project with any client, you want to see what they have in the budget for not only your time, your efforts but any peripheral items that you would not think of to begin with. For instance, if you need to purchase a drive for extra drive space, if you need to purchase a font or perhaps any stock photography, stock imagery, that's going to cost money. So, when you're budgeting everything out and you're giving a client a quote, you want to make sure that you include, for instance, $100 for stock photography because you know that it's going to need that and the project can't be completed without it. They need to know going in what they're expected to pay you not just based on your time but the extra elements that it's going to take to complete the said project. Monetary budgeting can be very tricky so you want to make sure that you're considering colleagues who are in the same business as you, past projects that you've done for other clients to sort of see that you're quoting a price that's reasonable for you as well as the client. You want to make sure in the end that the client feels like that they got what they were looking for, what they had expected but they weren't taken for a ride. Conversely, you want to make sure that you didn't finish a project and feel like you gave way too much time, energy and effort for an unsubstantiated amount of money or a disappointing amount of money based on many factors. At the end of a project, it's very important to consider that all the promises you made in the beginning, when it came to monetary budgeting, "Stock photography was going to cost $100," "This font was going to cost that," that it shows at the very end of the project so that they can see where their money went at the very end so they know why you had requested that money to begin with. You don't want to get to the end of a project or near the end of a project to realize you have to purchase a font, a piece of stock photography or video and then it has to come out of your pocket or the project doesn't get done."