How to film architecture and interiors for social media.
A photograph shows what a space looks like. Video shows what it is like to walk through it, how the light changes, and why it was designed that way. Here is how we would film it.
A finished space gets photographed, and it should be. But a photograph shows what a space looks like, and video shows what it is like to be in it: the approach, the turn into the main room, the ceiling opening up, the light moving across a wall through the afternoon. For a firm whose work is experienced on foot, that difference is the whole point.
We work with companies on a monthly plan: one filming day on site, cut into 30 edited clips, posted every day. For an architecture firm or an interior designer, that raises a fair question. Where does a month of content come from, when a project takes a year or more to finish? This is how we would answer it, and how we would film the day.
Where a month comes from when projects take a year.
The finished room is the payoff, not the whole feed. Between one handover and the next, a firm has projects on site, work on the desks and people making decisions every day. Each of those can be filmed, and together they fill a month without waiting for the next completion.
- The finished space When a project completes, the full walkthrough, on the ground and from the air.
- The site A project under way, filmed again at each visit, so followers watch it change month to month.
- The studio Sketches, models, material boards, the pin-up where a scheme gets argued over.
- The reasoning Your architects and designers explaining one decision at a time: why the window sits there, why that stone, why the ceiling drops over the kitchen.
For an interior designer, the same holds at a smaller scale. The sourcing trip, the fabric samples laid out on a table, the room before and after, and the install day, when everything arrives at once. An install is a good day to film, because the whole change happens in front of the camera.
Of the four, the reasoning is where we would put the most weight. The finished photos show the result. The designers explaining their choices show the thinking, and the thinking is what a future client is hiring.
Anyone can post a beautiful room. Only the firm that designed it can say why it works.
How we would film a finished space.
We would film a finished space slowly. The camera moves at walking pace or holds still, and each shot stays on screen long enough for the room to register. Architecture is about proportion and sequence, and neither survives a fast cut. The order follows the building: arrive, enter, move through, look back out.
Light does much of the work in an interior, so the day is planned around it. Rooms that face the morning are filmed in the morning, and the exterior gets the late afternoon. If a project was designed around a view, a courtyard or a skylight, the shot list is built around the hour it looks its best.
Before and after is the one exception to slow. A renovation filmed from the same spot before the work and after it can cut straight from one to the other, and the change does the talking. A space in use helps too, with the owner's permission: a kitchen with a family in it, an office with the team at work. People give a room its scale.
From the air, a drone shows what nobody on the ground can see: how the building sits on its site, the roofline, the landscape, the street it faces. Dre flies it himself, under his FAA Part 107 certification.
The people who designed it, and the month after.
On the filming day we would record short interviews with your principals and designers, one decision per answer. We develop the questions with you beforehand, so nobody is asked to talk about a project in the abstract. Questions like these get specific answers:
- What was the brief, and what did you change about it?
- Which decision on this project are you proudest of?
- What do clients misunderstand about the process?
- What would you never do in a space like this?
One raw video becomes 30 edited clips: long-form project films for your website, short edits of the details for the feed, all with motion graphics and subtitles, formatted for each platform. We post every day, answer the comments and handle the DMs, and anyone asking about a project of their own goes straight to your team. You approve the plan and every post.
A long project can also become something bigger. If we are on site every month anyway, that footage can become a mini-documentary of the whole project, up to about an hour, cut into episodes for social. It is quoted per project, on top of the monthly plan. How we would film the build itself is its own article: construction progress video, month by month.
At the end of each month there is a report on what people watched and asked about, and the next strategy meeting opens with it. If followers kept asking about one material or one room, the next filming day goes back for more of it.
The finished work, the work in progress and the people who can explain both are already there. What a firm needs from us is a day a month on site and a team that posts every day in between. See what the month includes for architecture and design firms.
Common questions.
Your projects, filmed from site to finished room.
We come to your site or studio for a day each month and film what is happening there: the project as it goes up, the finished spaces, the people who designed them. Then we cut the month from it and run your accounts.
More from the blog.
Let's film your company.
Tell us what your company does and what happens there on a schedule. We'll come back with what a month of content could look like.