Your marketing calendar needs video every week, but one-off projects stall, budgets swing and quality drifts. We get it. A video production retainer gives you a dedicated Lava Media team, fixed monthly output and pricing you can forecast.
Book a Free Retainer ConsultationWe map your next 90 days before we touch a camera: campaigns, launches, events and the formats each one needs. You approve one roadmap instead of briefing us project by project, and every shoot day is booked against real demand.
We shoot in concentrated blocks, not scattered half-days. One crew, one call sheet, dozens of assets — the same logistics discipline that produced 290 photos and 162 videos for a single resort client in eight shooting days.
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Every hero asset is cut into the formats your channels actually need: 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, subtitled, silent-scroll and paid-ready. Colour, typography and sound stay identical across everything, so a year of content still looks like one brand.
We track what performs and feed it back into the next quarter. For MEIZU we ran a branded YouTube channel this way and passed a 50,000-subscriber annual KPI by August, finishing the following year at 87,000 subscribers.
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A good retainer roadmap answers three questions upfront:
A three-month engagement, eight shooting days, over thirty locations — and one unified visual language across every asset. This is what retainer-scale production looks like when logistics, not inspiration, is the bottleneck.
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For teams that already have footage, product assets or a brand system and need volume. We run an edit-and-generate pipeline — post-production and AI video — turning existing material into a steady monthly stream of social, paid and channel cuts. No shoot days included.
Our most-requested video production retainer package. Every quarter we run a dedicated shoot day, then edit that material into a full month-by-month release plan. Ideal for corporate video programmes and social media video calendars that must never go quiet.
A full outsourced video department for brands running national campaigns, multi-market launches or continuous channel programmes. Multi-day shoots, agency-level creative direction, and the same team behind your B2B video and YouTube channel every month.
Strategists, directors, editors and animators sit in-house, so nothing gets lost in a handoff between three separate vendors.
You approve a monthly figure and a quarterly scope, which means finance stops re-approving every single video request.
We have delivered hundreds of assets to a single brand standard, so scale never costs you visual consistency or brand control.
Every retainer starts from a commercial goal — pipeline, recruitment, launch — not from a shot list. See our B2B video production approach.
We review your current video output, channels and goals, then tell you honestly whether a retainer or a one-off project fits better.
You get a written quarterly roadmap: deliverables, formats, shoot dates, approval points and the monthly figure. Nothing is open-ended.
We shoot in batches and edit continuously, so assets land on your calendar every month rather than in one end-of-quarter dump.
Each quarter we review performance together and rebalance the next roadmap toward whatever formats are actually driving results.
Tell us your channels, your monthly volume and your budget range. We will send back a retainer scope and a fixed monthly figure — no obligation.
A video production retainer is an ongoing agreement where you pay a fixed monthly fee for an agreed volume of video work instead of quoting each project separately. You get reserved crew capacity, a locked quarterly scope and a predictable invoice — the same model marketed elsewhere as a video production subscription.
Our standard video production retainer agreement runs quarterly with a 30-day notice period, and most clients renew rather than restart. Longer 6- and 12-month terms are available at better monthly rates. You are never locked into a year to find out whether the model works for you.
Plenty of platforms sell subscription-based video production services, but most are edit-only marketplaces routing work to freelancers. Lava Media is a full production company: directors, cinematographers, animators and editors in-house, so a subscription price does not mean stock footage and templates.
US retainers typically run from roughly $3,000 per month for edit-led packages up to $30,000+ for full campaign production. Ours start at $3,500 and scale with shoot days and output volume. For a detailed breakdown of what agencies actually charge, see our guide to video production cost.
Unused production hours roll forward one quarter, so a slow month is not money burned. Shoot days are the exception — crew and equipment are booked in advance, so a cancelled shoot day inside 14 days moves rather than rolls. Everything is written into the roadmap before the quarter starts.
We agree the metric before production: pipeline influenced, channel growth, recruitment applications or campaign reach. For MEIZU the metric was subscribers — a 50,000 annual KPI hit four months early, reaching 87,000 the following year. Every quarter we review the numbers and rebalance the plan.
