What is your minimal crew for a standard shooting?

Hi Squad!

From your experience, what is an optimal crew size for something relatively simple, like a talking head + b-roll shooting (vide VBC, Testimonials, etc).?

And if you do your shoots as a team (however small or big) rather than doing it all by yourselves, which supporting roles do you usually hire people for?

I've been a one man band way too often in the past, which - from my experience - forces you to take care of so many different aspects of the production, it's sometimes hard to execute everything well without at least one department going south. Also, some clients tend to mistrust one man crews, especially when they compare them to competitors who provide a bigger team for the project (even if the "crew" consists mostly of the videographer's helpers 🤣).

So I wonder - what is the optimal crew size that doesn't stretch the budget very much, but allows for some minimum task delegation (eg. you're directing and/or DP-ing, someone else takes care of the audio recording quality, etc). Of course not talking about hyper-complicated narrative commercial sets where anything below a large and highly specialized crew is non acceptable, just a typical video asset production ;)

Thanks for you input! 💪

Just you, doing everything (one man band)

You + a "general" assistant (someone to help you carry around the gear, etc)

You as a Dir/Dop + some general assistant + a specialized audio guy

You as a director/interviewer + a DP who takes care of all the tech stuff

Bigger crew with separate DP, gaffer, sound guy etc. roles

Other configuration ;)

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