Most people hear the word retainer and picture one of two things.
Paying every month for somebody to be available or buying a set number of videos, like a phone plan.
Neither one is what this is, and both are bad deals.
Not a video a month. A shoot day a quarter, output all year, and a library that gets more valuable the longer you own it. What ongoing actually means.
The expensive part is not the editing
Here is the thing that decides the whole shape of this.
Editing is cheap. Not free, but cheap, and it scales. Once we have footage of your plant, cutting a second piece from it costs a fraction of cutting the first.
What is expensive is getting there. Scheduling around production. Getting the plant manager to hold still for twenty minutes. Waiting for the light. Finding out the machine you came to film is down until Thursday. That part costs the same whether we leave with one video or thirty.
So the efficient shape is not a video a month. It is fewer days on site, more coming out of each one.
We shot a residential contractor a handful of times and it produced more than fifty videos. Not because we worked faster. Because we stopped going back and forth.
What a quarter actually looks like
One day on site. Sometimes two if you have multiple locations or a big install happening.
Six to eight weeks of output from that day, released on a schedule instead of all at once.
One piece that matters out of each visit. The case study, the recruiting piece, the customer story. Something that gets used in a proposal or on a wall, not just on social.
A short list of what we did not get, so the next visit has a plan before we show up.
Then we come back.
Why the second shoot day is worth more than the first
This is the part that surprises people.
We already know the building. The first visit, a real chunk of the day goes to figuring out where the light is bad, which room is too loud, and who actually knows what they are talking about. The second time, we walk in and start.
We know who is good on camera. Every company has two or three people who are unexpectedly great and one person everybody assumed would be great who is not. You only learn that by filming them once.
People say yes the second time. This is the big one. The employee who ducked the first shoot has now seen the video. He watched somebody he works with look good in it. The second visit, he volunteers.
You know what was missing. After the first round you can see the hole. Not enough of the actual work. Nobody explaining the hard part. Too much of the front office. Round two fixes it, and you cannot know what to fix before you have seen round one.
The first shoot day is partly a scouting trip that happens to produce a video. Every one after it is just production.
The part nobody thinks about until it is too late
You cannot go back and shoot last year.
Two years into this, you own footage of the old building before the addition. The line before it was automated. The guy with thirty one years who retired in March. The job site at week three, when it still looked like nothing.
None of that was the point when we filmed it. It becomes the point later, when you need to show where the company came from and the only thing you have is a photo somebody took on a phone.
The library is the actual asset. The videos are what comes out of it.
When a retainer is the wrong idea
Three times you should not do this.
You have no habit yet. If nothing is getting posted now, buying more of it will not fix that. Do one project, watch what happens to it, and decide after.
Nobody owns it internally. Somebody on your side has to be the person who posts, sends, and puts it in the proposal. If that person does not exist, the videos will sit in a folder, and that is an expensive folder.
Nothing visual is changing. If you make the same product the same way and nobody new is walking in the door, quarterly is too often. Once a year is fine. Say so and we will do that instead.
We would rather tell you this now than have you cancel in month five.
What it costs
It depends on how many days on site and how much comes out of each one, which is why there is no number on this page.
What is fair to say is that the cost per finished piece drops hard after the first visit, for the reasons above, and that most of the value shows up in year two.
If you are only going to do this for six months, buy a project instead.
We also spend some time up front on what each piece is actually for before we film anything, because deciding that afterward is how footage ends up unused.
The short version
A retainer is not a subscription to videos.
It is a schedule for getting on site, and a library that builds while you use it.
One day a quarter. Output all year. The second year is better than the first, and that is the whole reason to do it that way.
If you already have a video and you are wondering what happens now, or you want to know what a year of this would look like for your company, happy to walk through it.
Dylan Smith is the owner of With A Twist Media in Greensboro, NC. He has been making documentary style video for manufacturers and construction companies across the Triad since 2019.