The Snapshot – Pre-Production
| Industry | Video Recording & Editing |
| Business | Solopreneur |
| Location | UK |
| Time Saved | 6 hours per week |
| Cost Saved | £600 per month |
| Tools Used | ChatGPT (Custom GPT) |
The Challenge
Leki runs a video production business as a solopreneur. Every project starts the same way. A client brief, a shoot date, and a blank page where the script needs to be.
Before any filming happens, Leki needs to understand the subject matter and research the industry. Identify what will resonate with the client’s target audience, and shape that into a workable concept. For a new client operating in an unfamiliar or emerging industry, that process takes time. A lot of it.
For every hour of filming, Leki was spending one to two hours on research and pre-production. On a typical four-hour shoot, that meant two hours of client conversations and background research before a camera was even switched on. Across a full week, the time cost added up to six hours — and £300 per shoot, or £1,200 a month.
The deeper problem was what that research time was displacing. As a solopreneur, every hour you spend on pre-production groundwork is an hour you are not spending on filming, editing, or winning new business. Research was consistently outpacing execution, and clients were waiting up to two days for initial concepts to land.
The Solution
We built a custom ChatGPT tailored specifically to Leki’s pre-production workflow.
The process started with documentation. On day one, we created all the business and process documents the GPT needed to understand Leki’s working style. The types of clients they work with, and what a strong video concept looks like. On day two, we set up and shared the initial GPT.
The tool works by taking information about the client. Their industry, their target audience, and their website — and using it to generate an initial video concept and research brief in a single step. It flags relevant topics for the video, highlights angles worth exploring. And gives Leki enough context to make fast decisions about what’s relevant and what isn’t.
What used to take two or more hours of independent research now takes minutes. Leki reviews the output, refines the strongest ideas, and moves directly into scripting. Spending time on the creative decisions that actually require human judgment rather than the groundwork that precedes them.
By the end of the first month. Initial pre-production research had dropped from over two hours per project to just a few minutes.
The Results
- 6 hours saved every week — research time cut from hours to minutes per project
- £600 per month recovered — the cost of pre-production time back in productive hours
- Client wait time reduced — concepts arrive faster, giving clients more time to refine and approve
- New content angles uncovered — the GPT regularly surfaces topics and ideas that manual research misses, opening avenues that wouldn’t have come up otherwise
What Leki Said
“I’m really happy with the tool that Phil has put together. Usually researching video ideas has been a long process, especially when a new client operates in a new or emerging industry. Video Script GPT flags suitable topics for video and provides enough information that I can decide if it’s relevant quickly. I spend a lot less time falling down rabbit holes and find that my time spent on pre-production is now more focused.”
— Leki, I Am Leki
What This Means In Practice
Six hours a week sounds like a modest saving until you consider what six hours means to a solopreneur running a video business.
That’s six hours a week you reclaim from work that produces no direct output — no footage, no edit, no finished product. Research is necessary, but it doesn’t appear on a showreel or in a client invoice. It’s the cost of getting to work, not the work itself.
The other thing worth noting is the quality impact. When research takes two hours and the clock is running, there’s pressure to stop when you have enough rather than when you’ve found the best angles. The GPT removes that pressure. Because the initial research happens in minutes, Leki can spend more time developing the strongest ideas rather than racing to find enough of them.
The unexpected benefit — the GPT surfacing topics and angles that manual research would have missed — is often what makes the biggest difference to the final product. Better briefs lead to better scripts, and better scripts lead to better videos.
If pre-production, research, or any other part of your workflow is taking longer than it should, let’s look at what a custom AI tool could do for you.
