UGC Testimonial Video With Real, Consented Customers

Where the weeks actually go: Filming takes a day. Getting to that day takes three to five weeks, and that is the engagement you are buying. Finding customers with a specific story, screening them on a call, then clearing the paperwork. In education technology a teacher's school or district normally has to approve before a face and an institution name appear in a paid ad, and that approval moves at the speed of a board meeting. Anyone quoting you finished testimonials inside a fortnight is using actors or skipping consent. Who ends up on camera: Your customers, sourced from your CRM, your support queue and your onboarding calls. We screen for whether a person can say one concrete thing, a number, a before, a moment it went wrong, rather than for how enthusiastic they sound. We ask for the ones who nearly churned and stayed, and for at least one who still has a complaint. Those are the cuts people watch to the end, and they are the ones your sales team will send. Paid for time, never for sentiment: Participants receive a flat fee for the hours, disclosed on screen and in the ad copy. They are not handed a script, they see the cut before it runs, and they can pull any line without giving a reason. If somebody has to be paid into being positive, you have a product problem and no film fixes it. What we refuse, plainly: No actors. No AI avatars, no voice clones, no synthetic patch of a line the person never said. No employees or investors framed as users. No second take to make a claim stronger than the first take made it. And in crypto, no customer describing what they made. A return in a customer's mouth is still your claim, and MiCA Article 7 does not care whose face delivered it. We turn this brief down regularly. It converts, which is precisely the reason it is a liability. The consent file you keep: Signed likeness and usage releases with a defined term, territory and media scope. Employer approval where somebody's job is on screen. A record of what was paid and how it was disclosed. The FTC rule at 16 CFR Part 465 and the Endorsement Guides at Part 255 both place the exposure on the advertiser rather than the production company, so you receive the file itself, not our assurance that it exists. In Czechia it is the same bundle you put in front of Rada pro reklamu when a competitor complains. How it is shot: Self-shot with a kit we ship, phone at 4K, a wireless lavalier, one light and a stand, with the session directed live over a call rather than left as a brief and an upload link. Where the setting carries the story we film it ourselves in Prague or Brno. Cut vertical first, subtitles burned in because most of the audience is muted, delivered as short paid cuts, one longer cut for the site, and the full transcripts. Not included: Media buying and paid distribution. Written case studies and PR. Anything on third-party review platforms, including seeding, incentives and response writing; we do not put words near a star rating. Founder and employee content, which is a different craft with different consent problems. Who this is not for: Companies where nobody has used the product long enough to have a story yet. Wait two quarters and the same money buys something real. Anyone who wants approval over what a customer says beyond factual and legal accuracy, because that approval is the thing the format is worth. And anyone who needs assets this month. The calendar above is not padding, it is the consent.