Most Bothell businesses that ask us about video start in the same place. They know they need it, they have a Canyon Park office or a Main Street storefront that would look good on camera, and they have no idea which video to make first. The instinct is to commission one big brand film. That is usually the wrong first move: it is expensive, takes months, and gives you one asset for one place. What a growing company actually needs is a small set of short videos that answer the questions your buyers, candidates and partners are already asking. Here is the order we would make them in, what a shoot day involves, and what it costs.
Why B2B Video in Bothell Is Its Own Thing
Bothell is not a retail town the way Kirkland's waterfront or Woodinville's wine district are. The Canyon Park business park is full of biotech, medical device and software companies whose customers are other technical people: lab directors, procurement teams, engineers, hospital buyers. Add UW Bothell and Cascadia College feeding them graduates, and the smaller service firms along North Creek supporting them, and you get an audience that is well informed and hard to impress.
That changes how your video should look and where it should live:
- Technical audiences want to see the thing. Show the lab, the device, the software, the people who build it. Stock footage and sweeping aerial openers read as filler to someone who knows the field.
- LinkedIn is the first screen, not Instagram. For most Canyon Park companies the buyer, the partner and the next hire are all on LinkedIn, so plan for square and vertical cuts with captions, because the sound is off.
- Trust beats hype. A calm, clearly lit founder explaining what the company does in forty seconds will do more with this crowd than a fast-cut sizzle reel.
- Downtown is different. If you are on Main Street or near Bothell Landing, you are selling to the neighborhood, and the short vertical clips carry more weight than the LinkedIn cut.
The Five Videos to Make First, in Order
If you only ever make five videos, make these, in this sequence. Each one draws on the footage from the last, so the total cost stays reasonable.
- 1. A 30-second hero clip for the website and ads. One tight piece that answers "what do you do and for whom" with real footage of your space, your team and your product. It sits at the top of your homepage, runs as a LinkedIn or Meta ad, and opens your sales deck. If you make one video, make this one.
- 2. Vertical short-form clips. Cut from the same shoot: 15 to 30 seconds each, captioned, sized for LinkedIn, Instagram Reels and TikTok. These are the posts that keep your company visible between announcements. Five to ten of them is a month of content.
- 3. A founder or team intro. Sixty to ninety seconds of a real person explaining why the company exists and what it is like to work with. For B2B buyers this is the one that turns a cold email into a reply, because they have now seen a face.
- 4. A "how it works" walkthrough. Walk a customer through your process or product in plain language. This shortens sales calls, answers support questions, and gives your LinkedIn posts something substantive to point to.
- 5. A recruiting clip. Canyon Park companies compete with Seattle and the Eastside for the same engineers and scientists. A 45-second look at the actual workplace and the people in it does more than any careers-page paragraph, and it is mostly footage you already captured for the first four.
What a Shoot Day Looks Like
A content day is three to four hours on site, working around your normal operations. We do not clear the room or ask people to stop working; the point is to capture the real place. We start with the founder or team interview while everyone is fresh, usually in a conference room or a quiet corner of the lab with the workspace visible behind. Then we move to b-roll: hands on equipment, screens, people in conversation, the details that make your company recognizably yours.
If your building's exterior is generic, and most of Canyon Park's are, we grab a few outdoor frames somewhere nearby with character: the Sammamish River Trail, the North Creek Trail boardwalks, or downtown Main Street. Woodinville and Kirkland businesses get the same treatment with their own backdrops. Our post on what a content day looks like for a Lake Stevens or Marysville business walks through a day hour by hour.
How to Prepare for the Day
Preparation is what separates a shoot that produces five usable videos from one that produces one. Before the day:
- Write talking points, not a script. Three to five questions you want the founder to answer on camera. Bullet answers are fine; reading from a page never sounds natural.
- Decide who is on camera. Usually the founder plus one or two people who are good at explaining their work. Ask them a week ahead so nobody is surprised.
- Pick two or three locations inside your space. A spot for the interview, the place where the real work happens, and somewhere with people moving through.
- Wardrobe: solid colors, no fine patterns or other companies' logos. Your own branded shirts are fine if you actually wear them. Lab coats and safety gear are great; they say what you do without a caption.
- Clean the spots you will see, not the whole office. Clear the cables, coffee cups and half-empty boxes from the two or three places we are shooting.
- Have the product or the software ready to show. A demo environment with realistic data, a finished unit, a sample run. Whatever your walkthrough video needs, have it working before we arrive.
How One Shoot Feeds a Whole Quarter
The reason to think in sets rather than single videos is reuse. A three-hour shoot with a clear plan gives you the hero clip, a founder intro and a handful of vertical cuts on day one. The same footage then gets sliced differently as the quarter goes on: a 15-second cut for a LinkedIn ad, a quote card pulled from the interview, a behind-the-scenes clip for a hiring post, stills for the website and the sales deck.
One shoot day should cover roughly three months of posting for most B2B companies, because B2B feeds do not need daily volume; they need consistent, credible presence. If you post more often than that, or have a steady stream of new products and people to show, a monthly plan beats one-offs. Our post on social media content for Snohomish County small businesses covers the posting cadence side in more detail.
What It Costs
We keep commercial video pricing simple and public. Here is what applies to a Bothell business making these five videos:
- Founding Client Content Day, $500. For the first five Snohomish County businesses: a single three-hour content day producing one 30-second hero clip, two cutdowns and 10 stills, in exchange for a testimonial and permission to show the work. Bothell straddles the county line: Canyon Park sits on the Snohomish County side and downtown Main Street is in King County, so text us your address and we will tell you which rate applies. Twelve photos and five clips from one shoot. The right fit if you want the hero clip plus a first batch of vertical cuts and nothing ongoing.
- Content Capture, $1,500 a month. One half-day shoot per month, 25 edited photos and 10 vertical clips, delivered within seven days with full usage rights. Ninety-day minimum. The plan for companies that want the recruiting clip, the walkthrough and a steady feed.
- Capture + Managed, $3,000 a month. Everything in Content Capture, plus we write, schedule and post it across two platforms. For teams with nobody in-house to run LinkedIn.
- Long-form brand video, quarterly, $1,200. An add-on to a monthly plan for when you are ready for a longer piece, such as a full founder story or an extended walkthrough.
Everything above is listed on our Commercial page and in the commercial section of our pricing page. If you also need photography on the same day, our corporate photography guide for Everett businesses and our professional headshots guide for Lynnwood cover the stills side.
Where We Fit
We're Sunny and Tina, a husband-and-wife photo and video team based in Lake Stevens, a short drive from Canyon Park. We are building out our commercial book, which is why the founding rate exists: we would rather earn our first Bothell testimonials at a fair price than talk about work we have not done yet. What we bring is the ability to work fast in a room full of people without stopping the room, clean off-camera lighting (the frame at the top of this post is from one of our sports sessions; the lighting approach is the same in a lab or an office), and a turnaround you can plan around: seven days on the monthly plans, one week on a founding day.
If you are in Bothell, Woodinville or Kirkland and are weighing which video to make first, tell us what you do and who you sell to. Text or call (708) 677-7136, email sunny@sunnytproductions.com, or use the contact form. We reply within the hour, 7 days a week.