How fast can I get my video?

You have a date. A trade fair, or a launch, and in six weeks the room will be full. Somewhere between now and then there has to be a video that doesn't exist yet.

You've got the idea, maybe even the budget. What you don't have is time to do it twice. So before you call anyone, you want to know one thing: how fast can I get my video? And will I make it?

One video of up to a minute, I make in five working days, with two rounds of revisions. A campaign with a main film and a few cutdowns, I deliver within fourteen days. With an AI video, the first version is often there within a week. If decisions get made on the spot, you're done in one to two weeks. With the usual feedback rounds, it's three to five weeks.

That's a big gap between five days and five weeks. It rarely sits in the making. It sits in the deciding.

Rendering is the fast part

When people think about speed, they think about the tech. How fast does it render, how quick is the AI? By now that's the least interesting part of a production. Generating an image takes minutes. Choosing one can take a week.

A film is a pile of choices. What do we say, to whom, in what tone, with which face, to which music, and could the logo be a bit bigger? A choice I'm allowed to make myself is made in no time. A choice that has to go past three colleagues and a managing director can take days. That's not a complaint, it's how organisations work. I've been in this trade for 25 years and I still don't render any faster than my computer. What I can do something about is the number of choices still open once we've started.

So the size of a project tells you little about how fast it's done. What counts is how much is still up for discussion. DENSO is the best example I have.

Two hundred films in fourteen days

DENSO wanted to invite two hundred guests to a DTM event at Zandvoort, with a video that was personal to each of them. Their name on screen, their own voice-over and the subtitles to match. We had two weeks.

On paper, that's the slowest project you could think of. Two hundred versions, and every one of them has to be right. Even so, everything was delivered within fourteen days. I think that's because there was very little left to choose. The story was fixed: a red Porsche 911 and a mysterious driver, the same film for everyone. Only the name, the voice and the subtitles changed per version, and nobody needed a meeting about those.

The deadline decided the approach, too. With two weeks on the clock, we made the images, music, voice-over and sound design with AI. Direction and editing held it all together.

DENSO: one film, two hundred slightly different versions. Delivered within fourteen days.

The script was already there

With DENSO, the speed came from the format. With Green Flash, it came from the client.

Luuk, managing director of Green Flash, wanted Taiwanese policymakers to feel how urgent the switch to renewable diesel was. He came in with a script and a metaphor: frogs in boiling water. The metaphor was his, the film became mine.

So the hardest decision was on the table before I'd done a thing. What are we saying, and how should it feel? My job was turning that into images: the look of the frogs and the rhythm of the edit. The film was done within fourteen days.

Green Flash: a frog in boiling water. The frog didn't make it. The deadline did.

You don't need to show up with a script. That's what I'm for. But if you know what you want to say, so do I, and then it moves fast. The edit itself is the easy part by then.

The Green Flash edit timeline. This is what everyone pictures when they think about speed.

What I do when your deadline is tight

If time is short, you want as few decisions as possible left for the production itself. You sort that out up front. With a tight deadline, I ask for these four things:

• One person who says yes. A name I can reach, and not a team that's going to look at it together on Monday.
• The script is locked before any images are made. Changing a sentence in a script takes a minute. In an edited film it means generating again, editing again and approving again.
• The main film first, then the rest. Cutdowns, vertical versions and other languages come once the main film is approved.
• A date. With a date I can plan backwards. "As soon as possible" gives me nothing to plan with.

What I won't do: skip the script to save time. It feels like a shortcut. You see the first version a little sooner, and then the meetings start anyway, about something that has already been made.

I also don't make four versions so you can pick one. Four versions is four times as much to talk about, and before you know it, you're asking for a fifth.

So, will you make it?

One video of up to a minute can be done in five working days, if everything is decided up front. A campaign can be done within fourteen days. An avatar set is ready within two to three weeks, sooner with express delivery. If your organisation likes everyone to have a look, count on three to five weeks. That's a perfectly good schedule too, as long as you know it in advance.

How a production like that runs, from the first call to delivery, is on the page about AI video production. If you want to know what a film like that costs, read what an AI video costs.

Or call me, tell me your date, and I'll plan backwards from it. That date is fixed. How fast you get there is mostly up to you.