So, you’re in the market for a video? Congratulations! You’ve come to the right place whether or not you know exactly what form you want it to take or what you’d like to spend. If you’re relatively new to video production, or even if you’ve done it before, you’ll likely be starting from a blank page or at best, a bit of an idea. Whichever it is, welcome aboard! The first step in the process is always about discovery. And to help us get a quick handle on your needs, it’d be really helpful if you could fill in our basic questionnaire.

First things first – we need to know everything you can tell us about your business, aims, audience and message. If you’ve filled in our questionnaire, we’ll have a good idea already. Next we’ll drill down on all that information to distil the key points. Too many points and you’ll lose your audience in waffle. Too few points and you’ll waste your opportunity. Just the right amount of points and you’ll engage your audience with a memorable message. At Square Fish, we’re quick to determine the right amount of points for the length of program you want, and skilled at creating the best ‘hook’ to get your audience in and watching your video.

What’s in a script? Good question. It’s arguably the most important stage of the video process and the blueprint for how your message will be conveyed through sound and vision. At Square Fish, we work with you to design the best combination of visual and audio elements. These can include moving footage, still images or animation, narration, interview, on-screen graphics, music and sound effects. The clearer your information and direction in the concept stage, the faster we’ll get up to speed. Once we’ve fleshed out a creative treatment or script, we’ll send it to you for approval along with a detailed cost breakdown. This is the formative stage where the job scope can change and be adjusted as we lock down the script ready for production.

We love stories and telling your story is what we do best. Because video production is part creativity, part skills and part trouble shooting, we’ll work closely with you on a production schedule that suits the availability of your talent, our contractors, locations and, if it’s outdoors, the weather! At Square Fish, we go out of our way to make your people look and sound as good as they can, whether they’re sitting at a boardroom table, on the side of a stage or standing out in a paddock under a hot sun. We create beautiful backdrops for your onscreen talent to inhabit and capture stunning imagery to illustrate the story being told. And because great pictures deserve great sound, we record the best location or studio sound possible. Getting these elements right in production will pave the way for a smooth edit and a great final product. 

At Square Fish, we don’t just value our clients, we value their audiences by making every video look and sound the best it can. To do this, we shoot with top of the range gear and use skilled contractors in our writers, directors, cinematographers, sound recordists, editors, animators, make-up artists and more. We select contractors on their ability to deliver quality and to make the experience for clients and onscreen talent as comfortable and empowering as possible. Our people are not only professional and friendly, they’re also highly adaptable, so if a location isn’t suitable for any reason, like weather, we can shoot green screen and insert an appropriate background in post-production.

Filmmaking, they say, is writing one story, shooting another and editing a third. With this in mind, having started your job with a great script that we then shot, we head into the edit suite having safely backed up your footage, with just what we need and nothing we don’t. This is not only good for your budget, but allows us to shape the story to your key messages while letting the best performances blossom on screen. Whether you’re in the edit suite with us during this process or watching successive cuts online, we’ll keep you in the loop and up to speed on our progress. Just like baking a good cake, it takes skill and time to get the story right. The art of editing is the know how to deliver emotion and mood in a given time frame. At Square Fish, we pride ourselves in doing just that and making your video watchable, memorable and effective.

Once you’ve viewed a first draft cut and suggested changes either in person or via our feedback platform, we then make those changes. With the revised program in hand,and following final approval by you, the edit is considered “locked off”.  At this point titles and supers are added, the video is colour graded and the audio (dialogue, music and sound effects) tracks are professionally mixed. With the cake baked, iced and ready to dispatch, the final version is made available to you in whichever format or delivery vehicle you’ve requested. This might be a hard drive or uploaded to a designated web based platform. At this point we thank you for the opportunity to work with you, wish you all the best with the video, and look forward to working with you again.