Tom Mackellar.
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A finished product ad, at a price you can read off the page. Five seconds is £100, ten is £200, fifteen is £250.

CUT 03 / 06 What it costs

Priced by length, not by quote.

Three lengths, three prices, and that is the price — not a starting point I revise upwards once you have told me about your business. Every one of them is a finished, graded master with the social cuts, and every one is paid once. There is no retainer and nothing to keep paying for afterwards.

Five seconds

£100

One idea, one product, one look. A product-page loop, a story ad, a launch teaser. One round of changes.

The one I’d suggest

Ten seconds

£200

Room for a sequence rather than a single moment: several shots cut together, with a beginning and an end. Three rounds of changes.

Fifteen seconds

£250

The full length a pre-roll or a paid social slot will take, and as many shots as the idea needs. Changes until it is right.

Included in all three

The master, the cuts, and the sign-off before any of it

You approve the look scene by scene before anything is produced. You get back a cut and graded master, in 4K where the placement supports it, plus the 16:9, 9:16, square and 4:5 versions each placement needs. None of it is quoted separately as an extra.

What you get, in full

These are my prices while I am building up a body of client work, and they go up once it is built.

How this actually works

Generation is the camera. I’m the director.

Every piece runs through eight stages. A machine makes pictures at two of them: the stills you sign off, and the shots built to match the stills you signed off. The other six are the research, the brief, the storyboard, the previz, the post and the delivery — frames retouched by hand in Photoshop, then cut, retimed and graded in DaVinci Resolve. That is why this costs £100 instead of the several thousand a shoot would, and days instead of weeks. Which tools do what is in the FAQ, in full.

Brief → look you sign off → production → cut & grade
Tom Mackellar, photographed in a studio against a neutral grey background under soft light.
Who you would be working with

I’m Tom Mackellar. I run the whole thing myself, one project at a time — so there is nobody to hand it on to and nothing waiting on anyone else.

More about how I work

Everything on this site is shown start to finish and labelled for what it is: self-directed piece, invented brand, unofficial spec test, or a company of my own. I have not made an ad for a paying client yet. Nothing here is padded and nothing is dressed up as a commission it wasn’t — least of all the Pepsi one, which no part of PepsiCo has ever asked for or seen.

Also

Two other things I do.

Motion is the main thing and it is what the rest of this site is about. These two are the same job in a different medium — same person, same prices-on-the-page, same no-retainer.

Wanting two of the three is common — a logo and the site it lives on, or an ad and the identity it has to match. Say so and I will price the pair rather than adding the two numbers together.

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Send me the product and the deadline.

Start a project

£100, £200 or £250 depending on the length. Paid once, and that is the whole of it.