How a Commercial Film Is Made: 6 Stages from Brief to Delivery

"We want to have a commercial film made — how long does it take?"

Don't trust anyone who answers that question with a single number. Because a commercial film isn't a shoot day, it's a six-stage process. The shoot day is just one of them, and usually the shortest.

Below I describe the process as it is. I'm not giving prices, because price changes with scope. But if you know what each part is, you'll read the quote you receive correctly.

1. Brief and strategy

Everything starts with this question: what is this film going to do?

"Brand awareness" is not an answer. An answer sounds like this: "We want bookings for the spa we just opened, our target is 35+, the Russian and German markets, and the film will run in Instagram ads and on the website homepage."

Once that's clear, the film's length, language, tone — even how many versions there will be — determine themselves. When it isn't clear, everyone shoots beautiful footage, the film gets published, and nothing happens.

What I ask the client for at this stage: target audience, channels, the result to be measured, brand guidelines, previous work if any, and how satisfied they were with it.

Duration: 3-7 days, mostly depending on the client's internal approval speed.

2. Creative and script

We take the brief and turn it into an idea. The output has three parts: a concept text, a script, and a storyboard.

The script writes down what happens scene by scene. The storyboard turns it into frames. The point of a storyboard isn't to be a work of art, it's to surface the disagreement before the shoot. Rough drawings are enough; what matters is framing, movement and order.

There's one more intermediate step here: music direction. Music sets the rhythm of the film, and leaving music to the end is the most common mistake. If the edit rhythm isn't known upfront, the shot durations you filmed can easily fail to fit.

Duration: 5-10 days. The number of revision rounds is the only thing that stretches this. Write into the contract how many revisions are included.

3. Pre-production

The invisible but most decisive part of the job. It contains:

Location scouting. I photograph the space, look at how the light turns through the day, and decide which façade we shoot at which hour. A set you walk onto without scouting loses a day.

Cast. Choosing the actor or model. If we're working with an agency, you need to start at least ten days ahead.

Permits. Municipality, hotel management, shopping centre, beach, drone permission. In Turkey a drone permit is a serious item and doesn't get sorted at the last minute.

Crew and equipment plan. How many people, which camera, which lights, gimbal or slider or jib for camera movement. All of it is a budget line.

Call sheet. Hour by hour, who is where doing what. Productions that skip this end up gathering in the middle of the set to argue.

Duration: 7-15 days. Longer on jobs requiring permits.

4. The shoot

The shortest stage. For a typical brand film, 1-3 days.

Shoot day is technically exhausting but calm in terms of decisions — because most of the decisions should already be made. If people on set are still saying "maybe we should do it this way," stage three wasn't done properly.

It's good for the client to be on set, but on one condition: with a single decision-maker. When a five-person client team is on set, everyone wants something different and the work stops. I discuss this upfront: who gives approval — if that person is on set, no problem.

Duration: 1-3 days, plus half a day to a day per additional location.

5. Post-production

This is where the film actually gets made.

Edit. A rough cut comes first and gets approved, then we move to the fine cut. Saying "cut this scene" at rough cut is cheap; saying it after the fine cut is expensive.

Colour. The stage where footage shot in log is given character. Alignment with the brand palette is built here.

Sound and music. Sound design, voice-over if any, music licensing. Music licensing is not something to skip; a film published with music you have no commercial rights to can be taken down by the platform.

Graphics and subtitles. Logo animation, lower thirds, multilingual subtitles.

Duration: 10-20 days. Revision rounds are decisive here too.

6. Delivery

The most frequently skipped stage and the one that causes the most trouble.

Delivery is not a single file. Typically you need: a horizontal master (16:9), a vertical social version (9:16), a square version (1:1), short cuts (15s and 30s), subtitled and clean variants, and a separate version per language.

Every extra format is extra work. If you discuss this at stage one, I'll plan the shoot around it — I'll build framing that survives both a horizontal and a vertical crop. If it comes up later, either we crop and quality drops, or we reshoot.

There's also the archive question: who keeps the raw footage, for how long, and does it get handed to the client. That belongs in the contract.

Duration: 2-5 days.

---

How long in total

A simple brand film: 4-6 weeks. A campaign film with cast, multiple locations and permits: 8-12 weeks.

The only real way to shorten these is decision speed. The production side can move faster, but if client approval sits for three days, the schedule slides three days. Most delays happen in email, not on set.

The three things that delay a job

Unlimited revisions. If the contract doesn't state a number of rounds, the job never ends. Two rounds of edit revisions is normal; after the fourth round, we're discussing a new job.

Material arriving late. Logo files, product samples, brand guidelines, approved copy. Delays here hit post rather than the shoot, and get noticed too late.

An unclear decision-maker. The most expensive kind of delay. If the sentence "let me ask the boss" appears in the middle of a process, two weeks are gone.

The ordinary talks about the shoot day. The rebellious plans the delivery day from the start.