Security, NDAs, and office logistics for a corporate video shoot on a tech campus

Most of the office logistics for a corporate video shoot get settled before the crew arrives, or they get settled in the lobby while your interview slot burns. On a tech campus, five groups need to sign off before a camera comes through the door: security, legal, facilities, IT, and communications.

Security needs the full crew list, usually 48 hours ahead. Names as they appear on ID, vehicle information if the crew is loading through a garage, and a named employee escort for any badge-controlled floor. Legal needs to review or issue the NDA that covers everyone on set that day. Facilities needs to know which rooms you are holding, what furniture is moving, and whether anything is taping to floors or walls. IT should hear in advance about anything plugging into power or network. And communications should know a camera will be on the floor, because employees will ask them about it within the hour.

We are based in Sunnyvale and have served more than 100 companies, including LinkedIn, DevRev, LiveRamp, and UserGems. In our experience, the shoots that run on time are the ones where those five approvals were finished a week before load-in.

Sweep the background before you roll

Tech offices are full of things that cannot appear in a video. A good crew checks for four of them before every setup.

Whiteboards first. Roadmaps, org charts, and architecture diagrams live on whiteboards, and they are unreadable on set but perfectly legible in 4K. Erase them or reframe. Screens second. Any monitor in frame gets locked, turned, or set to a neutral page, because a dashboard or a Slack channel in the background is a leak. Prototypes third. Unreleased hardware has a way of sitting on desks, so ask the team to clear the shooting area before the crew arrives. Badge readers and door signage last. Wide shots of entry hardware and internal room names are easy to frame out when someone is actually looking for them.

Ask your vendor who on the crew owns this sweep. The answer should be a specific person, not the client.

Crew NDAs and footage handling

Expect your legal team to want everyone on set under NDA, including freelance camera operators and audio techs, not just the production company itself. The clean way to handle it is one agreement signed by the vendor that binds its whole crew, sent a week ahead so nobody is signing paperwork at the loading dock. A crew that works in tech offices regularly has signed plenty of these and will not blink.

The NDA should extend to the footage. Agree in writing on where raw files live, who can access them, how they transfer, and how long the vendor keeps them. Delivery should go through named-access transfer or encrypted drives, never a public link. The shorter the window between shoot and delivery, the less time sensitive footage spends outside your control. We handed off raw event files in under 12 hours at Human Tech Week in San Francisco, and same-day raw delivery is our standard on events.

Scheduling around a working office

Open floor plans are loud in ways that only show up on a recording. HVAC, espresso machines, and the 11:30 lunch migration all end up on your audio. Book interviews in the morning before the floor fills, hold the conference room for at least double the interview length, and if the walls are glass, hold the room behind the camera too.

Executive calendars are the other constraint. Camera setup takes about an hour, so never schedule an exec as the first slot of the day. Set up on a stand-in, keep the lighting constant, and give leadership a window instead of a minute. When their 2:00 becomes a 3:15, the crew is still ready.

Our post on what corporate video actually costs in the Bay Area covers the budget side, and we return a plan and a price within 48 hours of an inquiry. The takeaway is simpler than the checklist suggests: start the five approvals two weeks out, send the NDA in week one, and the shoot day itself will be the easy part.