Any suggestions for an office shoot

[Gary Paul Walker]

I'm due to shoot a feature film in a few months that's almost exclusively shot in an office. The production has only a little bit of money for equipment and I'm looking for any links / advice / reference material that might be good for a starting point for lighting.

I'm looking at the most basic lighting set-up for an open-plan office.

Does anyone have any experience with this? any advice is much appreciated from my fellow redusers :)

[Robert Hart]

An open plan office with panorama cityscape backdrop view will be great visually but will give you all manner of grief lighting-wise as the exterior light will change uncontrollably. For your project I imagine you will be limited to an internal office without windows.


From vague recall and I may be misguided, I think it was cinematographer on "Seeking Closure", Yuriy Zahvoyskyy, whilst on a constrained budget project, when faced by a limited lighting resource in an open office setting, thought outside the box.

They apparently got an electrician and unfastened some of the ceiling flourescent strip lights which were out of the shot and hung them vertically, with gels when needed to achieve more direct fill light on the talent as well as adding small amount of hard light for keys. I think they may have used some 1/4 magenta gels to take some of the khaki cast out of the lights.


One of the lighting setups done on a small budget out here involved three 650watt fresnels set for flood as down lights from a 12ft ceiling as individual pools onto the subjects, a soft panel about 300mm x 400mm as a soft fill, I think it was a genuine Kino. There was indirect daylight through windows on both side walls of the large room. They had a 2.4k HMI through ND gels to send some "daylight" onto a third wall in the room as the sun moved around.


Please do not afford any quality to my comments but heed the advice of others more knowledged than I.

[Rob Ruffo]

This is a very hard thing to light, because in reality the working light of these places looks like ass. I'd say your key is do not plan to shoot large areas, and plan shots that only show small areas at a time.