When should you build your film studio?

In our practice, we built a lot of studios: some were built from scratch, some were only decorated. And in each case, at the start of the project, we were faced with the question of what to do: rent a ready-made studio or build our own.

It would seem that the answer to this question is quite short - you need to look at the profitability of such a solution. What is cheaper?

For example, we had a project to shoot a football news show for YouTube. The project was planed for 1.5 years, 1 video per week. And we decided to build a studio from scratch for the following reasons:

1. Costs. The budget of primary costs for the rental of premises, the purchase of filming equipment and building materials, etc. below the cost of renting a ready-made studio. But that was the case in our project, when we knew that we were shooting 120 videos within 1.5 years.

2. Design. With our stage, we could experiment with the design of the scenery in any way we wanted. For example, we had real football goals and part of the football stand in the studio. In a rented studio, such scenery would be more difficult to get and there would be additional costs for setting up scenery for each video.

3. Speed. The news format implies a very prompt response to hot news. With your studio, you can record any urgent release very quickly. We recorded these both in the early morning and in the dead of night.

4. Post-production. In our case, the post-production department was located right outside the studio wall. We spent the minimum amount of time on the transfer of materials and, as a result, we received a high speed of news release, which is super important in this content format :)

Conclusion: if you have a long-term project with studio shooting, then it is more likely that it will be more profitable for you to build your own studio.

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