Investor Relations Video: What Listed Companies Should Film Before AGM Season

Australian AGM season runs from late October through November, and by the time a board signs off the annual report most marketing and communications teams have about four weeks left to produce anything visual. That is the single most common reason investor relations video gets skipped, rushed, or handed to whoever can operate a camera. After 18 years producing corporate and brand video in Sydney, we can tell you the gap is almost never budget. It is timing.

This is a practical guide to what investor relations video actually consists of, what each asset is for, what it costs, and the dates that matter if you want it done properly this year.

What is an investor relations video?

An investor relations video is a short, factual video asset that explains a company's performance, strategy or outlook to shareholders, analysts and prospective investors. It is not a brand film. The audience already knows who you are; they want to understand the numbers, the direction and the people making the decisions.

In practice most listed and large private companies need three separate assets, not one:

• An annual report highlight video. Two to three minutes, sitting on the investor relations page beside the PDF report. Revenue, strategy, outlook, in that order.

  
  

• A CEO or CFO strategy piece. Ninety seconds to three minutes of one person talking clearly to camera about the year ahead.

• Data animation. 2D animated sequences that turn the five charts nobody reads into something a shareholder can follow in twenty seconds.

Teams that try to combine all three into a single eight-minute film almost always end up with something nobody finishes watching.

Why marketing teams are being asked for this now

Three shifts have pushed investor communication onto the marketing team's plate rather than the company secretary's.

First, retail shareholder bases have grown and they consume information the way consumers do, on a phone, in a feed, at 9pm. A dense PDF does not reach them.

Second, hybrid and virtual meeting formats mean pre-recorded presentation modules are now normal. Instead of a chief executive reading slides live, many companies now record the results overview in advance, in a controlled environment, with graphics that actually work on screen.

Third, investor material gets indexed and summarised by AI search tools. A clearly narrated video with a full transcript on your IR page is now a discoverability asset, not just a courtesy.

The three assets, in order of priority

1. The annual report highlight video

If you only produce one thing, produce this. Two to three minutes, under 180 seconds if you can manage it. Structure it simply: what happened this year, what it means, what happens next. Use real footage of your operations rather than stock, because shareholders can tell the difference immediately and generic imagery reads as a company with nothing to show.

Budget in Sydney for a single-location shoot with an interview setup, a modest b-roll capture and animated data graphics generally lands between $12,000 and $25,000. That range moves with the number of locations. Every additional site adds a travel day, and travel days are the most expensive way to buy footage.

2. The leadership piece

A chief executive or chief financial officer talking straight to camera is the highest-trust asset in the whole set, and the hardest to get right. The temptation is to write a script that reads like the chairman's letter. It will not survive contact with a camera.

We write these as spoken language, then shoot with an autocue positioned so the executive keeps eye contact with the lens. Two hours of studio time is usually enough for a three-minute piece if the script has been signed off in advance. If it has not, budget half a day, because you will be rewriting on the floor and your legal and compliance reviewers will be on the phone.

One practical note: record the executive once, cut it several ways. The same session gives you the AGM module, the IR page video, a sixty-second social cut and internal comms content for staff who are also shareholders.

3. Data animation

Financial information is where 2D and 3D animation earns its keep. A revenue waterfall, a segment breakdown, a five-year capital expenditure profile: these are unwatchable as static charts and genuinely clear as twenty-second animated sequences with a voiceover.

Animation also solves a compliance problem. Animated sequences can be updated and re-versioned without a reshoot, so if a figure changes late in the approval cycle you are changing a graphic, not rebooking a crew and an executive.

Expect $2,500 to $6,000 for a set of animated data sequences built to your brand guidelines, depending on how many and how complex.

What this costs across the year

For planning purposes, a full investor communications video program for a mid-cap Australian company typically sits between $25,000 and $45,000 a year. That usually covers the annual report film, two to three results-period leadership updates, a set of reusable data animation templates and a corporate photography session for the report itself and for director and executive headshots.

The photography matters more than people expect. Annual reports still need executive portraits, site imagery and board photography, and shooting stills on the same day as video is the cheapest photography you will ever buy. If your report designer is asking for images in September, the shoot needs to be in August.

The timeline that actually works

Work backwards from the date the report goes to print or to the ASX platform.

• Twelve weeks out: agree the three to four key messages and who is on camera. This is the step teams skip, and it is the reason scripts get rewritten five times.

• Eight weeks out: script drafted, legal and compliance review started, shoot dates locked with executive diaries. Executive availability, not production capacity, is the usual bottleneck.

• Six weeks out: shoot. Video and stills on the same days.

• Four weeks out: first cut delivered with placeholder figures where numbers are still under embargo.

• Two weeks out: final figures dropped into the animated graphics, final approval, captions and transcript delivered.

If you are reading this with four weeks to go, the realistic version is a single-day studio shoot with the chief executive plus data animation, and you skip the operational b-roll this year. That still produces something credible. It just does not show the business.

Three mistakes we see every year

Treating compliance as a final step. Investor material carries forward-looking statement obligations. Bring your legal reviewer in at script stage and the process adds days, not weeks. Bring them in at final cut and you will be re-recording voiceover.

Filming before the numbers are settled. You cannot avoid this entirely, so design around it. Keep hard figures out of spoken dialogue and put them in graphics you can swap.

Publishing without a transcript or captions. A large share of viewing happens muted, and a transcript is what allows search engines and AI tools to quote your results accurately rather than paraphrasing a headline from somewhere else.

Bottom Line

Investor relations video works best as three separate short assets rather than one long film: a two to three minute annual report highlight video, a leadership piece recorded once and cut several ways, and animated data sequences that can be updated when final figures land. A full annual program typically costs $25,000 to $45,000 in Sydney, and the single biggest determinant of quality is not budget but how early you lock your key messages and your executive's diary. Twelve weeks before the report goes out is comfortable. Four weeks is possible, but you will be choosing what to leave out.

Global Pictures is a Sydney video production, animation and photography studio. We have produced corporate video, brand video, explainer and case study content for Australian enterprise and listed companies for more than 18 years. If you want to map out your investor communications video plan before this AGM season, we are happy to talk it through.