Three people, four people, one studio day: what crews actually look like
Published crew lists suggest a music video needs a department structure. The productions whose makers described them honestly ran on three or four people, and said so.
Credit blocks make every production look like it had departments. The interviews tell a different story, and the numbers are unusually specific when anyone bothers to state them.
Three people, three days, £2,000
Colin Peppard's video for Makeshift Art Bar's "Discipline": a crew of three, a Sony FX6, a bag of vintage lenses, three days in Benidorm, no permits. Permission was asked at each location on the spot.
The saving has a cost, and it lands in post: seven hours of footage for a five-minute cut, with a week and a half to do it. They solved that by shipping proxies to the editor every night so she could cut while the shoot was still running.
Four people, and no gaffer
Louise Collins on her directing debut, Sylvie Wiley's "Stranger In My Sheets": "We filmed the video at My Aerial Home in London with a small team of four: Sylvie, who co-created and co-produced the concept, myself as director, casting director, and editor, aerial dancer Izzy, and Ernest Tu, our DoP."
And the honest note about what four people cannot do: "Whilst Ernest would have appreciated a gaffer, we didn't have the luxury of a lighting team, so we used natural lighting and embraced the raw aesthetic."
Studio hours were capped by the budget, so the day ran entirely off a pre-built mood board, treatment, script and shot list. With four people, the prep is the production.
Thirty-five setups a day
Noel Paul on Mitski's "Where's My Phone?", shot over two days: "And we had to work fast. The shotlist was enormous. We did something like 35 setups per day."
Setups per day is the most useful scheduling number anyone publishes and practically nobody does. It describes what a day felt like far better than a budget does.
One day, and people working for favours
Edgar Wright on Julia Cumming's "My Life": one shoot day at Twickenham Studios plus a pre-light day, with the take used being number fourteen. On the economics of that:
A one take video by its very nature is a team effort. And so if people are doing it for favours, for next to nothing, it's got to be fun.
That is a well-resourced director describing the same labour model as everyone else on this page, which is worth sitting with.
The pattern
Across every production we read for this issue, exactly one stated a budget. Crew sizes, shoot days and setups were stated more often, and they are arguably more useful: they tell you whether a piece of work is reproducible at your scale. When you next describe your own production publicly, give the day count and the crew size. It helps the next person more than a showreel does.
A figure here out of date? Send us the current source and we will update the page and date the change.
