What Location Scouting Costs and What Moves the Price

People often ask me what a location shortlist should cost before they have decided how many places they need. That is the wrong order. The cost of scouting follows from a handful of decisions you make early, and once those are clear the figure stops being a mystery. In these autumn weeks, when many short factual videos are being planned before the dark evenings, I see the same surprise again and again: the camera and crew were budgeted carefully, while the hours spent finding and checking places were not counted at all.

On the course we treat scouting as a small project of its own. It has a start, a set of visits, a comparison and a decision. Each of those takes time, and time is where most of the cost sits. Before you pick a single place, write down how long the finished video will run, how many separate settings the script truly needs, and who in your team can visit them. Those three answers shape everything that follows.

• Video length and number of settings
• Who visits, and how far they travel
• How much paperwork each place needs

The most obvious cost is getting to the places. A site ten minutes from your desk can be checked in a lunch break, while one an hour away takes most of a day once you allow for the return journey and a proper walk round. If you scout alone, that day is your own time; if you bring a colleague, it doubles. Fuel, parking and train fares are small next to the hours, but they add up across a shortlist of five or six places.

One habit keeps this under control: group visits by area and by time of day. If two candidate places are close, see both on the same trip, and go at the hour you plan to film so you learn how the light and the noise behave. A second visit to answer a question you forgot to ask is the most avoidable expense in scouting, so take a written list of questions with you the first time.

• Group nearby places into one trip
• Visit at the hour you intend to film
• Carry a written list of questions

Access is where prices quietly rise. Some places are open to anyone with a camera; others need a written request, a named contact and a wait. Private grounds, shops, schools and council-managed spaces each have their own way of answering, and the answer can take days. That waiting is not free, because it holds up the schedule and sometimes forces you to keep a backup place in reserve.

Callum teaches this part of the course, and his advice is to ask early and ask clearly: state the date, the number of people, the equipment you will carry and how long you will stay. A precise request gets a precise answer. Where a venue charges a fee or asks for proof of insurance, you want to know that before you fall in love with the place, not after. Record every answer in the same format so that places can be compared side by side.

• Ask early, with date, crew size and duration
• Note any fee or insurance requirement at once
• Keep one backup place while you wait

A place can look perfect and still cost you a great deal once its limits are known. Think of noise from a road or a railway, a lack of power sockets, restricted hours, steps with no lift, or a view that changes with the tide of visitors. Each limit either shortens your filming window or adds equipment and people to work around it. None of these shows up in a photograph.

This is why the course asks you to record constraints in a fixed set of boxes during every visit: sound, power, light, access, hours and nearby rules. When the boxes are filled for each candidate, the true price of a place becomes visible. A free location with poor sound and no power may cost more in the end than a modest paid room that is quiet and ready. From a camera and lighting point of view, I also note which windows face which way, because daylight you cannot control is a cost too.

• Sound, power, light, access, hours, local rules
• Record the same boxes for every place
• Compare the full cost, not only the fee

Every extra place on a shortlist adds visits, requests and comparison work. A common mistake among beginners is to scout ten places for a three-minute interview. Two or three well-checked options are worth more than a long list of half-known ones, and they cost far less to maintain. Decide how many settings the story needs, then scout one or two more than that, not five more.

Cut places as soon as a hard limit appears. If a venue cannot offer the hours you need, remove it from the list and stop spending effort there. Side-by-side comparison only works when each entry is complete, so finish a place properly or drop it. The result is a short document a colleague can read in a few minutes and act on, which is the real purpose of scouting and the best way to keep its cost in proportion to the video it serves.

To estimate your own cost, count rather than guess. Take the number of places you intend to check, multiply by the travel time and the time you need on site, then add an allowance for each permission request and for writing up the comparison. Add a margin for one repeat visit. This gives you hours, and hours are easy to turn into a figure once you know what your own time is worth.

Do this before you commit to a shoot date, not after. If the total looks large for the size of the video, you have clear choices: reduce the number of settings, choose places closer together, or ask for access sooner. The module on location scouting and shortlists walks through this estimate with a worked sheet, so you leave with a method you can reuse on every later project.