A band documentary does not have to be ninety minutes and a festival submission. For a working band it is a four-minute film that a booker in another city can watch and understand who you are, what the room looks like when you play, and whether to take the risk.
The Kansas City angle
Kansas City has the venues to make a band look like a band: recordBar, Knuckleheads, The Truman, the Uptown, the small rooms in Westport and the 18th and Vine jazz clubs. It also has a music-press and radio ecosystem that shares a good short doc when it is about a local act. That distribution is worth planning the film around.
The Kansas City angle is the room and the drive. A film that shows the load-in at Knuckleheads and the van in the lot at midnight is a film about a Kansas City band, and it will get shared as one.
Rehearsal, load-in, show
We would book a shoot day that ends in a show. Afternoon: the rehearsal space, two songs run, and a short conversation on the couch about how the band started. Early evening: load-in and soundcheck, which is where the best footage always is. The show: two cameras, one at the board for clean audio and one in the crowd. The film is built on one song, with the day cut around it.
Four minutes for YouTube and the EPK, sixty seconds for the tour announcement, and a set of verticals from the show that post for a month.
What to actually make
- A four-minute short doc — one song, one show, the band's own voices, for the EPK and YouTube.
- A live performance video — the full song from the show, multi-camera, board audio.
- A tour trailer — sixty seconds for the announcement post and the venue listings.
- Show verticals — the crowd, the encore, the merch table, for the band and the venue.
What it costs in Kansas City
For most of the businesses in this post the right starting point is the Story Film at $4,500: a full shoot day with interviews, cut into a two-to-three-minute film. Every package is published on our brand film page, and the video production cost page explains what moves the number up or down. There is no travel fee anywhere in the metro, Overland Park to Lee's Summit to Lawrence.
How the shoot works
It is the same two people on every project, Josh and Brandon. We scope it on a call, write the shot list, show up with lights and a lav mic, and stay out of the way of your customers. A first cut lands in about two weeks with unlimited revisions after that, and you own every frame, including the raw footage on request.
If this is your business, the brand film page has the packages, the examples and the calendar link. If you are not sure which package fits, this is how we work and why the prices are on the site.