Glossary
What is a production day?
A production day is a single day of filming with a crew, equipment and location booked for that period, typically running ten hours including setup and wrap.
It is the unit almost every video quote is built on, and the one clients most often misread. A production day is not ten hours of filming. Setup, lighting, sound checks, resets between shots and wrap all come out of the same ten hours, which is why a shot list that looks reasonable on paper frequently is not.
Costs also do not scale linearly across days. A three-day shoot rarely costs three times a one-day shoot: crew day rates, equipment hire, travel, catering and location fees each compound, and the practical multiplier is closer to four.
What a production day includes
| Included | Usually excluded |
|---|---|
| Crew for the booked period | Pre-production and concept development |
| Camera, lighting and sound equipment | Post-production, edit and colour grading |
| Director on set | Professional talent and usage rights |
| Setup, resets and wrap time | Location fees and permits |
| Basic on-set catering | Travel and accommodation for distant locations |
How to get more from one
- Plan every output format before the day. Blocking for 16:9 and 9:16 at the storyboard stage costs roughly 15% more shoot time and doubles what the day produces.
- Shoot anything with on-screen text twice. Text position never survives a crop.
- Group locations geographically. Three customer interviews in one region across consecutive days costs far less than three separate commissions.
- Capture stills alongside. Same day, same light, and your photography matches your film instead of reading as a separate commission.
- Decide the deliverable list first. A day planned backwards from the outputs produces several times what a day planned around a hero film does.
In practice
On the DFDS Seaways campaign, DOT had a five-hour window between passenger arrivals on a working ferry. That single constrained day produced more than 100 platform-ready deliverables, because every format was blocked before anyone arrived on set.
See what a production day costs across each service on the services overview.
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