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Training video production: everything you need to know before commissioning
Table of contents
- Introduction
- What is training video production?
- Types of training videos
- How much does training video production cost?
- How to choose a training video production company
- What makes a training video actually change behaviour?
- Corporate training video production: working with an agency
- Interactive vs traditional training videos: which is right?
- Sources and further reading
Introduction
Commissioning a training video ought to be simple. You have something your people need to learn, you find a company that makes videos, and a few weeks later there is a film sitting on your learning platform. Then the quotes start landing and the whole thing gets murky. One supplier comes back at two thousand pounds, the next at forty. One sends a reel of glossy brand films, another sends branching scenarios and games. It turns out "training video" is doing an enormous amount of work as a phrase, stretching from a screen recording knocked out in an afternoon to a multi-module course that took a team three months to build.
If you are the person doing that digging, this guide is for you. It walks through what training video production actually involves, the formats and what each is good for, what it costs and why the numbers swing so wildly, how to tell a good production company from a merely competent one, and the question sitting underneath all of it: whether the finished video changes how anyone behaves. We have made training for UN agencies, health and safety providers, government bodies and global brands, and most of what follows comes from a decade of learning where the line falls between training that gets completed and training that actually sticks.
What is training video production?
At its simplest, training video production is the business of making video that teaches. That is a wide brief. It might mean onboarding new starters, taking staff through a compliance requirement, drilling a safety procedure, showing how a product works, building a soft skill like handling a difficult conversation, or guiding a team through an unfamiliar system. Whatever the subject, the intent holds steady. A marketing video is there to persuade or raise awareness. A training video is there to leave someone able to do something they could not do before, and that is the only measure that counts.
The process itself looks broadly similar whoever runs it. You start with a brief and a clear learning outcome, work through scripting, move into production, whether that is filming, animation, motion graphics or some mix of the three, then edit, and finally deliver in a format your learning management system can actually host. What separates good production from the rest is that every one of those stages is treated as a decision in service of the learning, rather than a step on a conveyor belt towards a finished file.
The bit that is easy to skate over is everything that happens before a camera comes out. A training video is only ever as good as the thinking behind it. You can shoot something beautiful that teaches the wrong thing, or teaches the right thing in a way nobody remembers a week later, and you will have failed at the one job that mattered. Hold that thought, because it is where a surprising amount of this market’s money disappears.
Types of training videos
Instructional and explainer videos
This is the workhorse of corporate training, and for good reason. An instructional or explainer video lays out a process, a concept or a set of facts clearly and in order. It might be a presenter to camera, a screen recording walking through software, a tidy motion-graphics breakdown, or a blend of all three. It is a natural fit for procedural, factual content where you mainly need people to follow along: how to file an expense claim, what a new policy actually means, how a particular tool works.
Explainers are quick to make and easy on the budget, and for the right material they are all you need. Where they run out of road is participation. The learner watches, and watching is plenty when information only needs to be seen and understood. Ask someone to exercise judgement or change a habit, though, and passive viewing tends to leave them short, which is where the richer formats come in.
Scenario-based training videos
Scenario-based videos drop the learner into a situation and let it unfold. Rather than describing how to handle a tense complaint, an unsafe worksite or an ethical grey area, they stage it, with characters, stakes and consequences you would recognise from your own working week. The point being made travels inside the story instead of arriving as a list of dos and don’ts.
They work because we are built to pay attention to narrative. A good scenario creates emotional context, and emotional context is one of memory’s strongest hooks. That makes the format a natural home for soft skills, safety, and anything where being right is a matter of reading a moment rather than reciting a rule. On a project with IOM, a United Nations agency, we built field scenarios for humanitarian staff in which a learner who followed one line of enquiry would surface information that a learner who followed another never saw, echoing the real conditions of the job, where decisions get made on incomplete evidence. A scenario like that can run linear, with everyone watching the same film, or it can be interactive, with the learner making the calls. The interactive version has grown into a category all of its own.
Interactive training videos
Interactive training videos put the learner in charge. Instead of watching a scenario play out, they steer it, branching the story with their decisions, clicking hotspots to go deeper, or working through games stitched into the video that test and reinforce what they have just picked up. Interactive video is our specialism, and it comes in a handful of recognisable shapes. Branching videos let choices bend the narrative and change the ending. Hotspot videos layer clickable moments over an ordinary film so viewers can dig in or take action. Gamified videos fold a challenge or a mini-game into the lesson. Hub videos gather modules, resources and activities into one place a learner can roam.
The reason it is worth the extra outlay is that this format delivers the conditions the evidence says learning needs, which we will get to shortly. For Big Green Egg, we turned dry reseller product training into something learners actually played, rebuilding the product from memory in the right order and racing through rapid knowledge checks, handling the detail rather than sitting back and letting it wash over them.
For Salus, a health and safety software firm, we built a gamified course set in a fictional Dinosaur Park where learners hunted down genuine risk-assessment hazards across the site, then filed each one under the correct safety terminology. The setting was daft on purpose, which is exactly why people remembered it, while the task underneath stayed entirely serious. Our guide to interactive elearning goes further into how these formats are built.
Animated training videos
Animation comes into its own when what you are teaching is hard or impossible to film. Abstract ideas, processes hidden inside a system, things too small or too vast to point a lens at, sensitive subjects where real footage would feel wrong, and content that has to stay identical across a dozen regions and languages all suit it. It also has a long shelf life. Live action dates, through haircuts, offices and the faces of people who have since left, while a well-made animation can hold up for years and be re-versioned for a new market without anyone booking a shoot.
We leaned on animation across a ten-module IT security programme for Vitol, mixing explanatory sequences with interactive simulations and cutting role-specific versions so each team saw what was relevant to them. At the other end of the spectrum, for Westminster City Council’s public health team, we made an animated story that taught young children how to look after their teeth. Animation can carry a higher per-minute price, particularly once you are into bespoke or character work, but the way it gets reused and re-versioned often makes it the cheaper option across the life of a programme.
How much does training video production cost?
The honest answer is that training video costs swing more than almost anything else you will commission, simply because the category is so wide. At the modest end, a screen recording or a short talking-head explainer might run from a few hundred pounds to a couple of thousand. In the current UK market, a properly produced training video of roughly five to twenty minutes tends to land between three and ten thousand, and a straightforward two to three minute corporate-style piece usually sits somewhere between two and six. A fully interactive, multi-module course, with original filming, custom games and branching paths, climbs well beyond that, because by then you are closer to building software than shooting a film.
You will see a lot of per-minute pricing thrown around, and it is worth treating as a rough sanity check rather than a formula. Live action often works out around eight hundred to fifteen hundred pounds a finished minute, cinematic work more, animation more again. The catch with per-minute maths is that most of the cost is locked in before a single second is cut. A crew day costs the same whether it yields sixty seconds or three usable minutes, which is why a shorter film is never simply a smaller slice of a longer one’s price.
Factors that affect training video production costs
Complexity moves the number far more than length does. A sixty-second animation with characters built from scratch can outprice a five-minute screen recording without much effort. What pushes a quote up is the shape of the shoot: how many days, how big the crew, one location or five, whether you need professional presenters or actors, how much scripting and how many rounds of changes the content demands, and how much animation, motion graphics and voiceover sit on top. Every extra person who has to sign off the script adds another lap of revisions, and revisions add up.
Two things matter especially for training. The first is versioning. If you need the same course in several languages, or cut for different roles, each version is more to build. The second is interactivity, which brings learning design and development on top of the filming, so a larger share of the budget lives in design and build. There is an upside worth knowing too. Producing a run of modules together is far cheaper per module than ordering them one at a time, so it usually pays to plan a programme rather than a single film.
Linear vs interactive training video pricing
A linear training video is priced much like any other production, by scope and by the project in front of you. An interactive course is priced on a different basis, because you are buying the thinking and the build as much as the camera work. Learning design, interaction design, scripts that account for every path, the assets each branch needs, and the development to make the whole thing run on your platform are all in there, and none of them surface in a per-minute figure.
Interactive does cost more up front, and it is fair to ask whether that is money well spent. The test is what the training is actually for. If people only need to clap eyes on some information once, a linear video is the right call and anything grander is waste. But if the training has to shift how people act, and the price of them getting it wrong is steep, then a cheap video that gets completed and forgotten turns out to be the dearer option, because you will pay for it again the next time the behaviour it was meant to fix goes wrong. The budget question and the effectiveness question are, in the end, the same question.
How to choose a training video production company
Start with whether they understand learning, or just video. Plenty of agencies are excellent on look and technology and have not the faintest specialist grasp of how people retain anything, so what you get back looks the part and teaches very little. Find out whether they make their own content or build courses around stock footage and templates, because the quality of the raw media does a lot of the heavy lifting on engagement. Ask to see work in your sector, or somewhere of comparable difficulty, rather than a general highlights reel. Check whether they run the whole job in-house or stitch together separate suppliers, since it is at the handoffs between content, production and development that quality tends to leak away. And ask a blunt commercial question while you are at it: at the end of it, do you own your course outright, or are you renting a platform to keep it alive?
The last thing to look for is the hardest to name and the one that matters most. The best work tends to come out of a company that treats your brief as the opening move rather than a checklist to tick off. Give a supplier a spec and a good one delivers the spec. Give them a problem and a better one will occasionally come back and tell you the thing you asked for is not the sharpest way to solve it. That conversation is nearly always worth having.
What makes a training video actually change behaviour?
Hermann Ebbinghaus described the mechanism back in the eighteen-eighties with his forgetting curve, which showed that we shed a large chunk of anything we have just learned within a day, and keep shedding it after that. A course watched once on a Friday has largely evaporated by Monday, however polished it looked on screen.
Working alongside a cognitive neuroscientist, we built our approach around the mechanisms the evidence genuinely backs, and three of them speak directly to anyone commissioning a training video. The first is autonomy. Give a learner a real choice with a real consequence and they take everything that follows more seriously than they would if you had simply told them what to do. The second is story. The brain responds to a good narrative almost as if it were living it, which is why the lesson buried in a story outlives the same lesson served as a bullet point. The third pairs spacing with testing. Attention gives out after about twenty minutes in all of us, so material delivered in chunks and revisited beats one long sitting, and being asked a question, even one nobody ever marks, is the single most powerful thing you can do to slow forgetting. It is the act of reaching for the answer that lays the memory down. Feedback is a nice extra. The asking is the mechanism.
A linear video carries story beautifully, and the good ones do. What it cannot easily do is autonomy, because the viewer never chooses anything, or testing, because there is nothing to reach for. Interactive video is the one format that manages all three at once, which is the whole reason we build the way we do. We have a shorthand for it: don’t just tell them. Show them, let them decide, and make them recall it.
Corporate training video production: working with an agency
Once a training programme reaches any real size, the practical question becomes who actually does the work, and there are three usual answers. You can bring in a freelancer or a small production outfit to shoot a video, which is fine for a clean explainer and starts to strain the moment you need learning design or interactivity. You can assemble your own team of specialists, an instructional designer here, a video company there, a developer to bolt it all together, and project-manage across the lot, which can work if you have the internal muscle for it but tends to cost more and lose a little something at every handoff. Or you can hand the whole thing to an agency that does it all under one roof.
The pull of a fully integrated agency is one creative and strategic thread running from the first brief to the finished course, with nothing lost in translation between teams and none of the coordination landing on your desk. At Rebel Rooster we write, film, animate, design the interactivity and build the final product ourselves, and we bring learning specialists in from day one rather than bolting the education on at the end. We are platform agnostic, we build to SCORM standards so courses drop into most learning management systems without a fight, and we usually deliver through our own authoring tool without a subscription hosting model, so the content stays yours and you are not paying rent on it for years. The relationship should feel collaborative the whole way through: a proper discovery conversation up front, a script you sign off, review stages built into production, and a course you can keep updating as things move on.
Interactive vs traditional training videos: which is right?
Interactive earns its cost the moment the training has to change behaviour: when people need to exercise judgement under pressure, when getting it wrong carries real consequences, as it does in health and safety, compliance and humanitarian work, when your workforce is scattered and cannot easily be gathered for in-person training, or when the current course is being quietly ignored and you need something people will actually engage with. If you catch yourself hoping people will remember and apply what they watched, rather than simply tick that they watched it, that hope is the tell. You need more than a linear film.
In practice, a great many briefs arrive asking for a plain training video when the better answer is an interactive one. That is a conversation worth having early, before the format and the budget are set in stone. If you are weighing up a training video and cannot quite tell which way to go, get in touch and we will help you work out what the content really needs.
Sources and further reading
- Ebbinghaus, H. — the forgetting curve, foundational research on memory and retention.
- Spitzer, H.F. (1939), ‘Studies in Retention’ — early evidence for the testing effect.
- Yang, C. et al. (2021), ‘Testing (Quizzing) Boosts Classroom Learning’ — systematic review of retrieval practice.
- CIPD — research on learning effectiveness and behaviour change in the workplace.
- Nielsen Norman Group — research on attention and engagement in digital content.
- National Training Laboratories — retention rates across passive and active learning.
