There are two ways to buy motion design. You can commission each video as its own project, or you can commission the parts every video needs and keep them.
The first way is how most organisations start. It works fine for one film a year. It stops working the moment you are publishing every month, because each video is priced from scratch, and none of them quite match.
What a toolkit actually contains
When we built one for EUMETSAT, the European agency that runs the continent's weather satellites, it came to seven things: two intro sequences, lower thirds, pop-up text boxes, scene transitions, animated backdrops, layered video frames, and social media versions of the lot.
All of it was delivered as 4K Adobe Premiere templates. That last part matters more than the design. Their own producers open a template, drop in their footage, and the branding is already right. They do not come back to us for every new piece, which was the entire point.
The maths
A toolkit costs more than one video and less than four. If you publish more than four pieces a year, it has paid for itself before the end of the first year. Everything after that is faster and cheaper than it would have been.
The second benefit is harder to put a number on: everything you publish starts looking like it came from the same organisation, because it did.
When not to do it
If your brand is about to change, wait. If you publish twice a year, a toolkit is over-engineering and you should just commission the two films. And if nobody in-house will ever open Premiere, you need a partner on retainer rather than a set of templates.
The question is not how much a video costs. It is how much your tenth video will cost.
Chloe Stewart
Co-founder
One half of Pronto Productions, a two-person design and motion studio in Kent.