Virtual Producer · free from Visual Narrative

The little producer that asks the big questions.

Plenty of businesses have a camera, some even have a videographer. Very few have a producer: the person who works out what a video needs before anyone picks up a camera. This one runs in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot, asks the questions I'd ask, and hands you a plan you can take to the boss.

Three quotes on your desk for the same video. £4,000, £11,500 and £22,000.

When I surveyed marketers about working with production companies, over half told me they'd been burned. Escalating costs. Slow delivery. "They didn't understand the brief."

Nearly all of it starts in the weeks before filming. That's the cheapest place to fix it, and the one part you completely control.

What a producer does before you spend a penny

Quotes you can actually compare

You email three companies and three numbers come back, nowhere near each other. They aren't three prices for one job. They're three prices for three imaginary projects, because nobody told any of us what we were pitching for. So we guess. Some pad it to cover themselves, some go low to win the work and come back for the difference later. Give everyone the same plan and the numbers line up, and you can see which of them has actually thought about it. Already got quotes? Paste them in and it'll explain the differences and give you the questions to ask each company.

No surprise invoices

Budgets don't usually blow up on the shoot day. They creep: an extra filming day, a fourth round of edits nobody agreed, a project that drags into next quarter.

The producer tells you what your budget typically gets you, in pounds or euros.

If ambition and budget don't match, it tells you what to cut before anyone else has to.

A plan you can take to the boss

Most marketers have commissioned video before. Half a day at an event, a few talking heads. Then someone hands you a five-figure budget and tells you to make something happen, and you find out how little of that carries over. Nobody teaches this, and it isn't your job.

You come away with the full plan plus a five-line summary for whoever holds the budget: what it is, why the customer will care, the cost range, what success looks like and the biggest risk. If it goes sideways later, it won't be because of something you left out.

How it works

You open it in whatever AI you already use and it asks you one question at a time. No forms. It won't let you away with "we want something engaging", because nobody on earth can price that.

Plan a new video, pressure-test an idea or a budget, compare quotes, or write a shoot plan for your own videographer. Already have one? Good. They're the camera, this is the producer. Along the way it catches the three traps that do the most damage:

The reference video trap.

You send a £2m commercial as your reference. It works out what you actually liked about it, because that bit is usually affordable even when the rest isn't.

The deliverables bomb.

"One 30-second video" becomes fifteens and sixes, vertical and square, subtitled, two languages. This is where budgets die.

The invisible sign-off.

Everyone who has to approve the final cut, named upfront, before your timeline turns into fiction.

At the end you get the plan, the boss summary, three one-line concepts to react to, and an honest note on the weakest part.

Send it to any production company. Us, or not us. I'd rather you briefed someone else properly than briefed us badly.

What you get

Two ways in, both free:

The universal version

VN-Virtual-Producer.md

Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot and hit enter. It introduces itself and takes it from there.

The Claude skill

VN-Virtual-Producer.skill

One click for Claude users. After that, just say "we need a video" and it starts on its own.

Get your producer

Free. Works in whatever AI you already use.

You'll also get my weekly email on getting more out of video budgets. One a week, unsubscribe whenever you like.

Built by me, Shane Martin, from over 20 years of producing video and the questions I ask on real client jobs. Visual Narrative makes video in Belfast and Dublin. And if you're making video every month rather than once a year, that's a different conversation, and usually a cheaper one per video.