Every brand eventually asks the same question: should we shoot this for real or build it in CGI? Having done both for years, our answer is that they are different tools. Here is the honest comparison.
Cost
A one-day real shoot with a small crew, a location, talent and post-production rarely comes in under $8,000 to $15,000 in a city like Montréal, and a stunt with permits and street closure multiplies that. A single CGI or FOOH film starts at $2,500 CAD with us and $2,000 to $8,000 across the industry. The gap widens with ambition: putting a Formula 1 car outside a hotel for real is a six-figure event. In CGI it was one afternoon of filming and a few days of build.
Time
A real shoot is weeks of planning, one day of filming that depends on weather, and one to two weeks of edit. A FOOH film is a ten-second phone clip today and a delivered film in two days. When a launch date moves, CGI moves with it.
Risk
Real shoots carry weather, permits, talent availability and the thing you only notice in the edit. CGI carries one risk: an uncanny result. A product that floats, a shadow that points the wrong way, a reflection that is missing. That risk is controlled by craft, which is why we always start from a real plate and match its light.
Results
Here is the part that surprises people. On social, the impossible outperforms the beautiful. A well-lit real product shot gets polite engagement. A robot walking down Sherbrooke Street got 600,000 views and 23,000 shares in a week with no media. A giant vacuum on a residential street reached 30 million. The reason is the comment section: people share what makes them ask “is this real?”, and nobody asks that about a real shoot.
When a real shoot wins
- You need real people: testimonials, founders, staff, customers.
- The product’s texture is the story: food, fabric, skin.
- You need a library of footage for a year of content, not one moment.
- The audience is buying trust, not attention.
When CGI wins
- The idea is physically impossible, illegal or unaffordable in real life.
- You need it in days.
- The goal is reach and shares, not conversion on the first view.
- The product is a hard object: a can, a car, a box, a building, a machine.
The hybrid most brands actually need
Our best-performing client work is neither pure. Sports Experts is a real parking lot with a CGI mountain. Mr FP is a real treatment room with a CGI robot and a real orthodontist reacting to it. The real footage carries the trust and the CGI carries the attention. If you want to know which side your idea falls on, describe it in a brief and we will tell you honestly, with a price for each route.
More on the format: FOOH and CGI ads at LenzVive.
