Video Art Department Services: San Francisco

Luma Creative provides professional video art department services in San Francisco. Our art department plays a crucial role in bringing our sets to life. Without them, we’d be shooting in plain offices or boring locations! They help us source the best locations based on our vision and then go a step further to even help us acquire the props and dress the set. Whether that’s looking through pages and pages of Airbnb listings or going door to door, they make it happen.

Once we have tentative locations, we usually scout the location with our director, producer, DP, gaffer, and production designer/art director. On these scouts, we determine what works about the locations, and what would need to change. Maybe the color palette on the walls is a little harsh. Or the direct sunlight would plague our exterior shots. To some, these scouts seem unecessary, but it’s really at these moments that the whole vision becomes reality. After all, once we’ve got a full crew on set, the budget gets expensive quick! So let’s do our homework beforehand!

While on many shoots, a full art department can be seen as a luxury, we did a shoot for Eyeque recently where it wasn’t an option to go without. The premise for this video was to show a woman’s life before and after she found out about the EYEQUE device. We’d be using the exact same actors and locations, so we’d need to drastically change the sets to make them different. And while a lot of this “change” was helped by camera, makeup, and lighting, we felt that changing the props and wardrobe would make the biggest difference. We even went so far as to use a split frame to show our character walking from one world to another! What a cool shot! Art direction played a huge role in making these worlds come to life!