A month of reels out of one shoot day

An FMCG group posting three times a week on two platforms, with a production process built for one film a quarter. Every reel was a separate booking: a crew, a location, half a day of somebody's time, and an invoice. Nine posts a month at that rate is not a content plan, it is a standing expense with a queue behind it.

The maths that made the case

A crew is expensive to book and cheap to keep. Most of what a shoot day costs is getting people, kit and a location into the same place; the marginal cost of the fourth setup once everyone is standing there is close to nothing.

So the brief inverted. Instead of asking what we could shoot this week, we asked what the brand needed for six weeks and shot all of it in one day. Four setups, twenty four usable cuts, one invoice.

The client's media budget did not change. What changed is that it now buys six weeks of posting instead of two.

Shot as a batch, written as a batch

Batching only works if the writing is done first. We went in with all twenty four concepts approved, grouped by setup rather than by posting order, so the day runs setup by setup and nobody is relighting for a single shot.

The order on the day was ruthless about it: everything on the overhead rig, then everything on the gimbal, then everything to camera, then the reset shots. That is not the order they post in, and it does not need to be.

Vertical, and actually vertical

Nine by sixteen was the framing on the monitor, not a crop applied afterwards. A shot composed for landscape and cropped to vertical loses its edges, and the edges are usually where the product is.

Every cut was also delivered one by one for the feed, framed at the time rather than squeezed later. That is two exports, not two shoots.

Captions are not an accessibility checkbox

Most of this audience watches with the sound off, so the captions are the soundtrack. They are burnt in, in Bengali and English, timed to the cut rather than auto-generated, and set in the brand's own face at a size that survives a phone held at arm's length on a bus.

Reels that rely on a voiceover nobody hears are reels nobody finishes.

What came out of the day

Twenty four cuts, delivered in a single batch with a six week posting schedule attached. One point nine million organic views across the run, at the same media spend as the quarter before.

The number the client cared about was different, and simpler: they stopped booking crews.