Hotel and restaurant video in Los Angeles, shot around the guest.

What hospitality content has to do in Los Angeles

The LA market is unusually crowded at the top. A Beverly Hills or Santa Monica property is not competing with the hotel down the street so much as with every luxury property the guest has seen on their feed that week. That changes what the content has to do:

• Prove the property, not the category. Generic luxury cues are everywhere. What converts is the specific: this terrace at this hour, this dish from this kitchen, this view from this room number. Specificity is the whole job.
• Work for the booking engine and for social at once. Room category clips, outlet coverage and amenity films sell directly. Vertical social clips build the reason to look. One shoot should feed both, or you are paying twice.
• Match the photography. Hotel websites are built on stills. When the video was shot by a different vendor in different light, the site looks assembled. Capturing both from the same setups is why we run photo and video as one crew.
• Survive a seasonal refresh. Menus change, pool season opens, the holiday programme arrives. A library built in modular pieces can be updated one piece at a time. A single long film cannot.

The library a hotel or restaurant actually needs

Lobby, suite, dining, facade and terrace: the standard hospitality library, shot as stills and motion from the same setups.

• A hero brand film. Sixty to ninety seconds that sets the feeling. Homepage, sales deck, group and events pitch. It should still be usable in three years, which means it is built on the architecture and the light, not on this season's menu.
• One clip per room category. Every category the booking engine sells gets a fifteen to thirty second piece: arrival, the view, the bathroom, the detail that justifies the rate. Shot in a blocked show room, never in live inventory.
• Every outlet, on its own terms. The breakfast room in morning light, the bar after dark under its own lighting, the pool at the hour it looks best. Restaurants get plating, the pass, the room at service and the signature dishes as both video and stills.
• Meetings and events space, empty and set. Group sales needs the room clean and then dressed for a wedding or a board meeting. Both are impossible to capture once the space is booked, so they get scheduled around the events calendar.
• Spa, fitness and amenities. Short, quiet, mostly detail. These are the pieces guests search for before booking and the ones most properties have no footage of.
• A vertical social bank. Twenty to forty short clips framed vertically at capture. The property's social team then has months of material that matches the website instead of fighting it.
• The stills library. From the same setups and the same light. The hotel photography guide covers the shot list in detail, and everything in it applies in Los Angeles.

Shooting around service without wrecking it

• Follow the property's rhythm. Lobbies in the mid-morning gap between checkout and check-in. Pools before opening or after the last chair leaves. Dining rooms in the hour before the first cover, with the kitchen plating for camera. The schedule is written around the operation, not around the crew.
• Real guests are not talent. Anyone recognisable on camera is booked talent or staff who have signed a release. Background guests are avoided, blurred or framed out. This is a legal question and a brand question at once, and luxury properties are rightly strict about it.
• Brief security and front of house. A crew that appears unannounced is a problem. A crew whose schedule is on the daily briefing is invisible. We send the plan to the GM, the marketing lead and the head of security before the day.
• Keep the footprint small. Two people, a cinema camera, a stills body, a compact lighting kit that runs on batteries. No cables across a corridor, no stands in a doorway, nothing a guest has to walk around.
• Styling is the difference. Rooms are reset by housekeeping to a standard we agree in advance. Tables are set by the restaurant's own team. A stylist or the property's designer on the day is the best money spent on any hospitality shoot.

Los Angeles practicalities that catch out-of-town crews

• Permits depend on which city you are in. Within the City of Los Angeles, filming that stays entirely on private property and touches nothing public usually needs no FilmLA permit. The moment a tripod is on a sidewalk, a lane is coned or parking is reserved, it does. Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Malibu and Pasadena each run their own film office with their own rules, and some want a permit for commercial work even on private property. We confirm the rule for your address at the brief.
• Certificates of insurance are routine and required. The property, and any city permit, will want a COI naming them. It has to be filed before shoot morning.
• The marine layer runs the coast in late spring. A Santa Monica or Malibu pool shot at sunrise in May or June is often a grey one. Coastal exteriors get scheduled for the afternoon in those months, while inland and Beverly Hills light is reliable year-round.
• West-facing terraces are golden-hour shots. The best hospitality frame in LA is usually a terrace, a rooftop or a pool at the last hour of light. There is exactly one of those per day, so the schedule is built backwards from it.
• Drone needs checking for the exact address. The Westside and the coast sit under LAX and Santa Monica airspace, and the valley under Van Nuys and Burbank. Commercial flight needs an FAA Part 107 pilot plus authorisation for that location. Where aerials are possible, the property's relationship to the ocean, the hills or the skyline is the shot nothing else gets.
• Traffic is a line item. A crew moving between a Downtown restaurant and a Malibu property is not doing both in one afternoon. Multi-location days are planned by geography, and it is often cheaper to add a second day than to lose three hours on the 10.

How a Las Vegas crew scopes an LA project

We are based in Las Vegas and work in Los Angeles regularly. That is worth being direct about, because it changes how a project is quoted:

• Travel is a line item, not a hidden markup. Mileage or flights and lodging are quoted separately so you can see exactly what the LA element costs. For most properties the crew drives in with the full kit, so nothing depends on checked equipment.
• Consolidate the days. A two-day shoot on one trip is far more efficient than two single days a month apart. We build the shot list to fill the trip, which is the same batching logic behind a content day.
• Local knowledge is bought, not assumed. Permit offices, parking, load-in, the marine layer, which terrace faces west. We do the homework for each property before the quote rather than discovering it on the day.
• Same standard, every market. The Drey and Montage Beverly Hills get the same crew, the same approach and the same delivery. Hospitality brands with properties in more than one of our markets are the projects we are built for.

More hospitality guides

• Hospitality brand film production
• Hotel & hospitality photography
• Restaurant & food photography
• Restaurant & hotel video production
• Las Vegas restaurant videography
• Las Vegas content day & retainer
• Where we shoot