When shooting a music video, the film location hire is extremely important. It’s where all the action will take place of course! It needs to be a space – or spaces – that work visually for you as an artist.
This can be a regular concert venue, a large ballroom, a dilapidated building, a rooftop, a hotel room – whatever you want!
It’s important though to budget accordingly to get the right location and understand the options available to you (and us) when sourcing the place.
If you have contacts from places you play at regularly or spaces that you know the owners of and these people will give you access to a location or give you a good hire rate, then by all means take it! It can very quickly solve a tricky part of the shoot planning, especially when working on a tight budget.
If this isn’t an option, we will discuss with you the kind of space you want to be in and what’s right for your track and then we will look into options and contact the venues and see what the hire costs might be or if a contra-deal can be arranged in exchange for some social media promotion. Sometimes places are happy to oblige on the understanding they get something out of it. Sometimes they will want a reasonable fee to shoot with them – it’s important to consider this option within your budget.
The Altostratus Penthouse in London, recently used on our Gower and Mae promo video shoot.
Another avenue to pursue is a location library – these agencies include LocationWorks, AltoStratus and many more – to get access to a much wider choice of locations. Literally hundreds of places who are open to filming at them – for the right price of course! A location library will charge a fee, usually set, to access their library / deal with the location and the owners. Some places have set prices to shoot at and some have variable prices depending on the shoot content, size of crew, kit involved, hours on site and so on. Some agencies also deal with locations working on lower budget shoots as well which can be very helpful.
Studio hire is always possible for a music video as well, there’s a lot of great spaces around like SLV and Millennium Studios which we shot in recently as well. Prices vary and so do facilities on offer but its worth investigating if you want a green screen shoot or a small set build…or even a large one!
Shooting the Thomas Cook promo at Millennium Studios – fake beach just out of shot!
We will always do what we can to get a great location for your video but the options available to us become infinitely greater when we can hire somewhere and so your end video can look infinitely better as a result.
Talk to us about location hire for your next music video and let’s see where we can find to play in for your shoot…