Plan a video budget

What this is about

The visible costs — crew, camera, location — rarely sink a video budget. The edges do: usage rights nobody priced, a subtitle version per market, a third feedback round, music licensing, the missing contingency line. A budget built from the deliverables backwards catches these, because every deliverable forces its own line items into view. It also hands you the tool for scope conversations: when the client adds a version, the budget shows the delta instead of absorbing it silently until the margin is gone.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• Usage and buyouts scale costs invisibly: the same film for one market and one year prices differently than worldwide, unlimited.
• Post is where underbudgeted projects go quiet — edit rounds, grade, mix, motion design and subtitling each deserve a line.
• The contingency line is a professional standard, not padding; ten percent is a widely used floor for shoots with real-world risk.
• Every budget version needs a date and its assumptions, so change requests get answered with a delta instead of a rewrite.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. List every deliverable first — each length, aspect ratio, language and subtitle version. The budget prices this list and the path to it, nothing vaguer.
2. Block the budget by phase: development, pre-production, shoot, post, music and licensing, versioning, contingency. An empty block must be a decision, never an oversight.
3. Price the shoot from the plan: crew day rates, equipment, location fees, talent, travel, catering. The day count comes from the setup count, not the other way around.
4. Budget usage and buyouts explicitly: where the film runs, for how long, in which territories. Talent and music costs scale with usage, and licensing after the fact is expensive.
5. Give post its real weight: edit rounds, grade, sound mix, motion design, subtitling. Count the included feedback rounds in writing.
6. Add a contingency line and defend it in the client conversation. A budget without reserve converts the first surprise into an invoice dispute.
7. Reconcile ambition against money on paper, not on set: cutting a scene in the plan costs a conversation, cutting it on the day costs the schedule.
8. Version the budget with dates and assumptions, so every scope change gets a visible delta and the history stays auditable.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Forgetting usage rights until the client asks to run the film as an ad — then the buyout negotiation starts from weakness.
• Funding the shoot by starving the edit, so the material is great and the film is not.
• Treating the contingency as the first thing to cut when the client pushes back on price.

With TillyGen

Because TillyGen derives setups and shoot days from the briefing, your budget rests on a countable scope instead of a hunch — and a scope change shows up as a visible delta.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.