3 Reasons to Hire a Local Crew Instead of Traveling to Your Shoot

So you’re a video production company owner or video producer and you just sold a shoot that is in a different city or country. For a newer company, the prospect of this can be exciting; you get to travel, you get to post to your instagram story about your trip, and you get to see new places and get paid while doing it. But after you’ve done it 5, 10, 20 times the light of excitement of out of town shoots could start to dim, leaving you indifferent on actually wanting to travel to a shoot.

At this point, you start to have to consider; should I hire local talent to shoot my project or should I go/send a team out to capture it? Of course, there are too many variables to give one answer, but in this article we’ll outline three main points as to why it’s usually best to hire local talent instead of traveling to your shoot. Here are the three reasons you should hire local video talent instead of traveling:

1. 1. Project Budget
      At the end of the day it is simply less expensive for the client and your production to hire local talent. For the average crew of 1-5 people, the cost of flights, hotels, travel meals, non-shooting travel days, etc is just not worth the difference of hiring local.

      Unless your project has an extremely particular look that is nearly impossible to replicate, or requires very specific shooters – there’s almost never a time where it’s less expensive to fly you or the team to the shoot.

      Say you have a one day, one person shoot in Atlanta, and you’re a corporate video production company in Cleveland. In order to fly in and shoot you’re looking at least $500 in flight tickets, $150 in hotels, and $150 in food. Plus a staff members time at $30 an hour, brings your total cost to the client to at least $1200-1500, this doesn’t even include your markup.

      To book a local talent for a similar one person one day shoot would cost around $500-1000, at the most.

   2. Time
      It takes 60 minutes to book a freelancer or a local team and have them shoot a local production. It takes at least 48 hours to travel to an out of town shoot, shoot it, and come back. If you’re someone who values their time, especially as a business owner, you’re much better off booking local talent and saving yourself or your staff two days of your life.

      This time could be spent on business development, moving other projects forward, and improving your video production business – instead of sitting on a plane and in a hotel.

      In 48 hours of travel and shooting you could; complete 300 cold calls to new business, organize and execute a direct mail campaign, send 40 recruiting emails searching for new talent for your company, meet with 8 existing clients to chat about future projects, and many other things. Find a better way to spend your time than traveling.

   3. Talent
      You might of had a bad experience before, but chances are that with the right remote video production booking company, you’ll find people in other cities and countries that are actually better than you of your in-house staff. Finding the right talent is all about having the right connections and having trusted relationships in place. Using the right booking sites and services, you’ll be able to find talent even in the most remote parts of the world than have an even more expansive skill set than your staff.

      The best producers know what their crew is capable of outputting and is able to be cold as steel when choosing quality over friendship. Sometimes it’s nice and fun to work with people you like, but for the sake of excellence it’s sometimes imperative you book people that are simply just right for the job. By tapping into local talent in the city of your shoot, you’re able to nitpick and find the people that are experts in the very type of production you’re looking to execute on.

      So unless you’re doing it for personal reasons, there are many times that booking an outside freelancer for remote work is not only cheaper, faster, but also better quality. Of course, this doesn’t always work out getting all three, but if you know the right resources you’ll get 2 of the 3.

   About Global Media Desk

   The Global Media Desk has been helping producers and video production companies get better, more cost effective, and faster crews for productions around the world since 2000. We do this by tapping into our global network of creative video & photo talent that deliver world class production quality at the drop of the hat.    Please contact us  with any questions you may have about shooting in any  country  around the world. You can also  request a  free online quote  to see how we can make your project  a complete success.