How to plan and budget for educational video production

When creating interactive online learning courses, oftentimes your content development might benefit from adding multimedia components, such as videos, to successfully immerse your audience in a captivating online learning experience. To incorporate videos and animation, it is key to understand the elements behind how to plan related budgets for high-quality video production. Whether you consider in-house production, or outsource to a production company, it is important to have a realistic budget for educational video production.

If you’re new to this process or have little previous experience creating videos in-house, this blog will help provide you with an understanding of how to have productive conversations with experts around video production for learning. To do so, we are excited to share with you some valuable insights that we gathered from our Pure & Applied team – after all, they have years of experience perfecting the process of video production planning and budgeting.  

Research and Planning

At the root of understanding the process lies some key information you should research before outsourcing. We sat down with Pure & Applied co-founder Nikitasha Kapoor who helped shed some light on what questions companies like yours should answer before approaching an instructional video production team for a project. The following 4 key areas can help you situate your learner’s needs, leverage what you already might have in house, and set a reasonable budget when hiring someone to produce your eLearning videos.

1. Identify Your Learners

Knowing your audience will help you determine the ideal setting for them to learn in and provide context and purpose for the content being used. This can help you determine if there is an intrinsic motivation for the video(s) or if it functions as a requirement to complete the course. Understanding your learners will also shed light on their needs and preferences that can inform how to present the material and how much time might be available for video content.   

2. Identify Your Learning Objectives

Knowing the learning outcomes intended for the videos will help provide an understanding of the context in which the students would learn best. The objectives can help you with designing the content strategically and help indicate how much time and content would be allocated to material within the videos. This can help you identify if one video is required in the course or possibly a series of sequential videos to cover learning objectives.  

3. Situating the video within the program

Identifying the role that your online learning videos will play in your entire program and the video delivery context is important to consider. This information will help you determine the function the videos should have, if they are relaying new information or meant to reinforce learning. This knowledge will help advise you on format and length when putting together your outline and providing guidance to the video producer to ultimately ensure optimal learning flow and consistency in material. Other questions you can ask yourself here include: 

• Is the video going to be part of an e-learning program? 

• Is it going to be a part of the program’s implementation or an internal training resource, onboarding guide or email series?

• Is it going to be experienced on a website or in an LMS?

• Is it going to be experienced on mobile, desktop or do you require both?  

These questions can help you situate where the video will live within the learning plan to be specific in your needs when developing the video to be direct and minimize any unnecessary extra production costs.  

4. Leverage your organization’s brand

If your organization already has a brand guide, you can provide this in video production as visual direction to keep consistent with your organizational image. If not, it is recommended you do some research of other existing videos to pull inspiration from for your proposed video style. This tactic is really helpful for any online learning video production group or individual to understand how they can help bring your vision to life – so keep examples of what you like and don’t like handy.

The importance of pre-production and budgeting

Now that we’ve covered some essential areas of research to prepare before starting the process, it is time to head into pre-production. Pre-production involves writing scripts, developing storyboards and gathering feedback. We’ll share our approach to ensuring the pre-production process is both inclusive of different voices while also being efficient.

Script development and the collaborative process:

If you already have a script, you’re ahead of the game! But, if you need help to develop your video script, we’ll work with your subject matter experts or even hire a subject matter expert to develop the script. With a script in hand, storyboarding lays out the scene alongside its script and includes visual direction and assets that would be needed per frame from a design perspective. This is usually then followed by a few rounds of collaborative feedback and review processes by key sponsors, clients, organization staff, target learner or stakeholders before the video is then moved into production, followed by post-production editing.  

Pre-production is important because it is the period in which we are able to refine the visual direction we’re going to go in. With storyboarding we clarify what message we are going to reinforce with the use of visual cues which enable dual coding. The theory of dual coding tells us that learning and memory are more effective when information is presented in multiple modalities, such as visually and verbally: showing and telling is better than either perceptual or verbal modes alone (Mayer, 2019). For example, combining words and images in videos or static graphics for the learner to engage with. Another example is seeing the instructor’s hand gestures as they are used to visually emphasize points being made verbally in instructional videos – seeing the instructor’s hands also helps the learner form a positive perception of the instructor in your course. Thorough pre-production planning will enable a smooth development process, which is also the most cost effective, as well.  

Keep your budget in mind:

Depending on in house capacity and expertise, video production can range in cost anywhere between $800 to $2000 per minute to develop. Costs will vary depending on how much work is required in pre-production, as well as length, complexity of animation or illustrations, style direction (live-action, animation, interview style, scripted or unscripted), and more.

If you require help in this area, we at Pure & Applied provide expert services to support on the instructional design components, development of storyboards and design assets and animations before heading into production, as well as post-production editing. We also help secure location, props, videographers, lighting and more.

We hope these areas key tips and tricks and valuable insights shared from our P&A experts will enable you to create a stronger case for video learning that is appropriate for your course and provide clarity on budget considerations.

Be sure to get in touch with us at Pure & Applied to help develop an effective pre-production plan and help produce your next eLearning videos! For more information about our services, visit our Digital Learning Development page. 

References

Mayer, R. E. (2019). How multimedia can improve learning and instruction