Turning a Hotel Room Into a Studio: Filming Ocean Conservancy at Arctic Circle Assembly

Details

Client: Ocean Conservancy 2024
Event: Arctic Circle Assembly, Reykjavik, Iceland
Location: Edition Hotel, Reykjavik
Format: Off-camera look interview
Crew: 3-person crew, 2-camera setup
Gear: 2x Sony FX6, prime lenses, professional audio package
Output: 4K UHD interview footage, delivered broadcast-ready

Insights

Not every interview happens on a purpose-built set, and one of the things we're proud of at GetCameraCrew is being able to build a studio-quality look wherever the job actually is. For Ocean Conservancy's shoot during the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, that meant turning a guest room at the Edition Hotel into a fully controlled interview space, with none of the conveniences of a real studio and none of it showing in the final footage.

Ocean Conservancy brought us in directly to capture an off-camera look interview on the sidelines of Arctic Circle Assembly, one of the busiest weeks on the Arctic policy calendar, where the subject speaks to an unseen interviewer rather than the lens. That style lives or dies on how clean the environment feels: the framing, the light, and the sound all have to hold up as if it were shot on a dedicated set, even when the actual space is a hotel room a few floors above a conference in full swing.

Our three-person crew ran a two-camera setup on Sony FX6 bodies with prime lenses, giving us a cinematic look and clean image quality even in a room that was never designed for filming. The team reworked the room's layout, controlled the light, and treated the space for sound, so the finished interview reads as a clean, professional set piece rather than a hotel room a floor above a policy conference.

That's the part of this job we think about as much as the gear list: knowing how to walk into a space that isn't built for filming and make it disappear on camera. A hotel room, a green room, a corner of a conference floor, it doesn't matter, the crew's job is to build the same broadcast-quality environment every time, so the client's message is what stands out, not the location it was shot in.

Working directly with Ocean Conservancy's team on-site also kept the day efficient. With the interview set up and shot cleanly in one room, there was no need to chase down a separate studio space in an already packed conference schedule, letting Ocean Conservancy stay focused on the Assembly itself while we handled turning their room into a set.