Plan an office shoot

What this is about

It is somebody's workplace. Phones ring, a meeting was booked in the room you needed, the ceiling panels flicker on camera and cannot be switched individually, and the glass partitions reflect the crew into every frame. Around all of that stand the people, who did not choose to be filmed and whose screens may show data that must never appear in a video. None of this is technically difficult. All of it has to be arranged before a crew turns up with a plan that was designed for an empty room and a cooperative building.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• Office lighting is the first fight: mixed colour temperature, flicker, and ceiling panels that cannot be dimmed or switched zone by zone.
• Glass walls reflect crew, lights and exit signs — plan angles that shoot along the partitions rather than straight into them.
• Everyone recognisable on camera needs consent, and screens in frame must not show customer data or anything confidential.
• Open-plan noise never stops: air conditioning, keyboards, calls and the coffee machine all end up on the audio track.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Walk the office at the hour the shoot will actually happen. Light, noise and corridor traffic look entirely different at nine in the morning and at three.
2. Book the rooms you need like ordinary meetings, with a buffer either side, and put a sign on the door so nobody walks in mid-take.
3. Solve the ceiling lights early: find out what switches or dims per zone, then decide whether to work with them, kill them or overpower them.
4. Plan around glass. Shoot along partitions, add negative fill or a flag for the worst reflections, and check each frame for a visible crew member.
5. Tell the whole floor in advance with a short email — times, areas affected, a contact name — and offer a route that avoids the shooting area entirely.
6. Collect written consent from everyone appearing on camera, and agree beforehand what happens with colleagues who would rather not be filmed.
7. Clear the screens and desks that appear in frame: prepared layouts or dummy data instead of live customer information, plus a pass for clutter and logos.
8. Protect the audio: interviews away from the air conditioning, and a hold on the printer, the coffee machine and the phone in that room.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Filming a real screen with real customer data and finding it again in the final grade.
• Choosing the glass meeting room because it looks modern, then spending an hour hiding the crew in every reflection.
• Informing only the department being filmed, so the rest of the floor treats the shoot as an interruption to argue with.

With TillyGen

TillyGen turns the building into a plan: which room at which hour, which setups share a lighting state, and where interview blocks sit so the floor is disturbed once.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.