Notes on the light
Almost all of the daylight at Playa Studios comes from above, through skylights set into an eighteen foot ceiling, and it falls close to straight down. That is a specific problem and it is worth planning for. Top light is generous on hair and shoulders and unkind under the brow, so faces need something coming back up at them. The concrete floor does more of that work than you would expect, and a bounce held low is usually enough to open the eyes again. We rarely need more than one.
The walls do not help. The main room is finished in fluted black panelling, and dark walls return nothing, so whatever you put into a face is exactly what you get back. Plan on carrying your own fill rather than borrowing it from the room. The skylights have a blackout option, which is the single most useful thing about this building for a film crew. Close them and you have a controlled stage at two in the afternoon. Open them and you have soft, even daylight across five thousand square feet. Decide which one you want before the day, not during it.
House lighting is dimmable throughout and there are chandeliers hung over the Event Room floor. Both are useful and both are a trap. Warm house light sitting under open skylights gives you two color temperatures in the same frame, warm on one side of a face and cool on the other. Either commit to daylight and keep the house lights up near full, or close the skylights and let the chandeliers own the room. Mixing them at half strength is how a reception ends up looking green in the shadows.
The spaces, and how they film
The Event Room. Five thousand square feet, seventy three feet wide by sixty five deep, under eighteen foot exposed ceilings. It is the only room here large enough for a full ceremony and a full dinner, so most weddings use it for both. A sixteen by sixteen modular stage is part of the venue’s inventory, which matters more than it sounds: its two feet of rise is the difference between a clean aisle shot and the back of a head. There is a twelve by twelve loading door at one end, large enough to drive through, and it is the cleanest way to get a dolly or a jib into the room without walking it past guests.
The Lounge. Three thousand square feet of furnished lounge, and where cocktail hour usually lives. An eighteen foot gallery wall runs up one side of it, and it is the best single background in the building for a wide two shot: tall, plain, and lit from above. It connects to the Event Room through oversized wooden doors, and it has its own kitchenette and two private restrooms. Lighting is dimmable, and we usually ask for it up a stop through the first half hour of cocktails.
The Parlor Lounge. A furnished room of around two thousand three hundred square feet off the main lounge, connecting to a kitchenette and restrooms. It is where we tend to put anything that needs to be heard away from the main floor: a private vow reading, a note from a parent, five minutes with a sibling before dinner. The furniture is the venue’s own and it is good, so you can shoot it as found.
The Green Room. The getting ready room, near the main entrance and next to the restrooms and kitchenette. It is small, a few hundred square feet, which makes it a room to hold and change in rather than a room to film a full morning in. If getting ready coverage matters to you, ask about using the Lounge under the gallery wall before guests arrive, where there is space to stand back, and keep the Green Room for the last few minutes.
Sound, and the room it lives in
Two things about this building shape the audio. The first is that the venue publishes a midnight guest curfew with no noise restrictions or music cut offs ahead of it, which means nobody is cutting the music at ten. The second is that five thousand square feet of concrete floor under an eighteen foot ceiling is a reverberant box. A DJ ready house system is installed and it is competent, but a board feed on its own will carry the room’s tail into every word. We run lavaliers on both people through the ceremony, a recorder at the officiant, and a separate desk feed for speeches, then choose between them in the edit.
The upside of a late curfew is that speeches do not have to be rushed to the front of the night to beat a cutoff. The downside is that the volume tends to climb as the evening goes. If there is a toast you want to actually hear in the film, put it before the dancing starts rather than after.
The films, so far
We have made one film at Playa Studios: Tyler & Eliza. One wedding in a top-lit room is enough to learn its one hard rule: overhead light needs a face turned up into it, and a black wall behind gives you the separation the ceiling will not. The second film at a venue is always better than the first, and we would like it to be yours.
Timing the day
Most weddings here use the Event Room twice, once for the ceremony and once for dinner, which means the room has to be turned over in between. Ask the venue how long their team needs for that and build the cocktail hour around their answer rather than around a guess. Whatever that number turns out to be, it is the busiest stretch of the day for us, because couple portraits, cocktail coverage in the Lounge, and the empty room details all have to happen inside it. Either give us a second shooter or give us a clear order of operations. What does not work is a short cocktail hour with a receiving line folded into it.
Because the building is indoors and has no garden or terrace, there is no golden hour to walk out into. The skylights only give you what the sky is giving, so if you want daylight on your faces, put the portraits in the Event Room or under the gallery wall while the sun is still up. A four o’clock ceremony in summer leaves you comfortable. A seven o’clock ceremony means every frame of the night is lit rather than found.
Load in and load out deserve a line on the timeline. The venue rents in twelve hour blocks against that midnight curfew, so the end of the night is fixed and everything before it has to fit inside. We ask for thirty minutes in the room before guests arrive, to shoot it empty and to set up. If the room is still being dressed at that point those shots simply do not exist, and the film loses the one wide that shows what the day looked like before anyone touched it.