Sketch studies I created for the Ghost logo, 2022.

Hi everyone, Bianca, the founder of Ghost speaking!

Given the big changes the treatment industry has endured over the past couple of years, and following the important decision to lower our research rates at Ghost — something completely unprecedented, as in over 10 years in this business the rates have only ever gone up, not down — I thought I’d write this post speaking directly to you, the client, observer, fellow treatment maker, or fan of our work, to address the reasoning behind this decision.

When I first started as a visual researcher, the work looked very different from what it is today.

Finding the perfect reference for a treatment was far from being about typing a few keywords into a search bar. If you were hired for a job as a visual researcher for a commercial or film, you were expected to have a good knowledge of who directed what, who the best directors were in advertising and film, and, even better, be quite good at connecting queries to visual memory. If someone asked, “Do you know any film with a scene of…”, ideally, you were expected to know the answer by heart, or as close to it as possible.

So, in essence, a good researcher was like a walking film archive.

You’d know commercials by heart from Vimeo, TV, or cinema. You could quote camera moves and name directors based on a shot. You knew who used match cuts, who loved dolly-ins, who shot on 16mm, who built their aesthetic around symmetry or handheld.

To find the right image, you didn’t “search” for it, you remembered it.

Up until around two and a half years ago, matching a scene from a director’s script to a film reference took a really long time, especially when working with directors who were particular about matching scripted scenes with visual research perfectly. Depending on the project, finding a single image could take hours and fill the entire day with the quiet anxiety of coming back to the director with disappointing news.

This was already implied in the fee. As a director or production company, you knew you were hiring someone who could potentially spend hours behind a computer searching for a single image. That takes time, and money. Being a visual researcher required a specific combination of visual literacy, narrative understanding, and persistence.

However, more recently, with the rise of AI-driven image tools and smarter visual databases, the process has become faster and more accessible.

Researchers can pull from an exponentially larger pool of imagery, whether it’s from cinema, photography, or AI-assisted stills. You can even pull cinematic GIFs from a website — something absolutely unthinkable a few years ago. The rise of still image libraries was already a huge step toward speeding up the process for visual researchers, and now GIF libraries represent another big leap, meaning that the chance of finding a perfect visual match has never been higher.

But this progress comes with a paradox.

These tools, while powerful and incredibly helpful, are not free, and each one specializes in a different visual niche. Some are excellent for cinematic stills, others for contemporary commercial imagery, others for photographic texture or lighting. To get the best results, you often need to mix and match subscriptions across multiple platforms, which adds up financially, for sure.

Setting a rate for a day’s work as a visual researcher is harder than one might expect.

At the beginning of my career, I heard from an exceptionally good fellow researcher that what we are selling, as visual researchers, is not just our visual archival knowledge or our time. We are selling taste.

Because, surely, many people can bundle together a range of images based on a given brief. But matching the perfect image to the director who requested it, to the brand’s guidelines, to the client’s (agency’s) expectations, and still come up with something beautiful and intriguing — that’s a very specific range of skills, and one that is worth money.

So when it came to adjusting the rates, I had to consider this: our philosophy, the market instability, the competition, what would be perceived as desirable by the production companies that hire us, versus what would be the rate that would still keep us working with a smile on our faces.

In other words, I wanted to make Ghost’s visual research services more accessible to production companies and directors while reflecting how the industry has evolved. The drop from $750 to $500 per day acknowledges that technology has shortened the research process, but it also recognizes the investment required to stay ahead of these tools and the enduring value of human curation — and the incredible value that a professional visual researcher brings to the making of a winning treatment.

Despite the challenges and fast changes taking place within the industry, I’m excited about the future and strongly believe that progress should benefit everyone involved.

And for us, that means keeping the bar high and the doors open.

Thank you for reading,

Bianca