Video Production Service Areas Across Los Angeles and Ventura Counties

Twenty-six cities inside one hour of the office

Studio 47 works out of Westlake Village, which sits on the Los Angeles and Ventura county line, and that position is the reason our coverage looks the way it does. Sixteen cities on the Los Angeles side, ten on the Ventura side, and most of them inside an hour of the office.

Distance decides more about a shoot than people expect. A crew that travels ninety minutes each way loses two hours of usable light and arrives with less in the tank. From this base we reach Calabasas and Agoura Hills in fifteen minutes, Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley in twenty, Camarillo over the Conejo Grade in half an hour, Burbank and Studio City in forty minutes, and Ventura or Santa Monica in under an hour. Long Beach and El Segundo are the long runs, and we stage those differently.

The other advantage is variety inside that radius. Ocean, mountain, orchard, harbor, studio lot, gated estate, historic main street and glass corporate campus are all reachable on the same day. A brief that would need three separate travel days in most markets fits into one here.

That is why we publish a page for every city rather than one page covering a region. What Malibu gives a camera is nothing like what Moorpark gives it, the light behaves differently, and the drive is not the same. Each page carries what has actually filmed there, what the terrain does, and who commissions work locally.

The Los Angeles County side, by what it puts in frame

Sixteen cities, and they divide into four working groups.

The coast runs from Long Beach through El Segundo, Santa Monica and Malibu. Between them you get harbor cranes and container stacks, industrial dune frontage under the LAX approach, a pier from 1909 with three miles of beach city behind it, and 21 miles of open shoreline under the Santa Monica Mountains.

The Westside carries the money and the history. Beverly Hills splits between flat gridded streets south of Sunset and canyon estates north of it, with Greystone Mansion and its 55 rooms above them. West Hollywood packs the Whisky, the Troubadour, the Roxy and the Sunset Tower into 1.89 square miles. Culver City is five square miles built around studios since 1917.

Central Los Angeles is scale. Downtown, Union Station, Griffith Park and the Observatory, 51 miles of concrete river, Venice Beach, and Hollywood's stage inventory at Paramount, Sunset Bronson and Las Palmas.

The Valley and foothills are where the industry works: Burbank with Warner Bros., Disney and NBC, Studio City with Radford, Glendale with the animation houses, Pasadena with the best Craftsman architecture in the country under the San Gabriels.

Then our own edge, Calabasas, Agoura Hills and Westlake Village, where King Gillette Ranch, Century Ranch and National Park Service ground give oak, ridge and ranch inside the thirty mile studio zone.

The Ventura County side, and what it costs less to shoot

Ten cities, 43 miles of coast and 1,843 square miles of land, and the whole county sits outside the studio zone premium that drives Los Angeles budgets.

Ventura is the county seat, with three separate waterfronts, a mission from 1782 and a Main Street that has doubled for period and contemporary settings for decades. Oxnard is the largest city and the flattest ground in our coverage, with Channel Islands Harbor, dune shoreline, farm rows and a historic downtown inside one street grid.

Inland the character changes. Ojai runs east to west under the Topatopa wall at 7,402 feet, which is why the last light of the day lands flat on rock instead of disappearing. Santa Paula and Fillmore hold intact early century main streets, one built on citrus and oil, the other on the Southern Pacific line and its 1887 depot. Moorpark gives orchard, mesa and a pepper tree main street.

Simi Valley is the deep bench: Corriganville, Big Sky Ranch, the Santa Susana Pass and a hilltop presidential library with a Boeing 707 inside it. Thousand Oaks is oak savanna, ranch architecture and the largest corporate employer in the valley. Camarillo puts a towered airport, an 1892 Victorian ranch house and a 1,187 acre Mission Revival campus in one drive. Port Hueneme is a working deepwater port with a mile of south facing sand beside it.

Where the county line actually runs

Westlake Village is the sharpest illustration in the region, and it matters on a call sheet.

The original master planned community covered 12,000 acres and the county line ran straight through the middle of it. In 1981 the 3,456 acres on the Los Angeles County side incorporated as the eighty second city in that county. The remaining 8,544 acres had already been annexed into Thousand Oaks, in Ventura County, in 1968 and 1972. The line still runs through Westlake Lake itself.

The consequence is that a mailing address reading Westlake Village tells you almost nothing. Two houses a quarter mile apart can sit in different cities, different counties and different studio zone positions, which changes crew mileage, call times and what a location day costs.

The same thing happens elsewhere along the seam. Agoura Hills, Calabasas and Westlake Village sit within a few miles of each other with three separate identities. Hollywood and Studio City are districts of the City of Los Angeles rather than cities in their own right. Port Hueneme is entirely surrounded by Oxnard.

We keep a page for each one because those distinctions decide real things: the drive, the look, the local buyer base and what has already been filmed nearby. When a location sits near a line, we check it at the scouting stage rather than on the morning.

Who books work on both sides of the line

The buyer list is not one industry, and it changes noticeably as you move across the coverage area.

On the Los Angeles side, Burbank's own economic development figures put entertainment at 66,014 jobs inside a 166,000 person workforce. Glendale publishes 1,500 technology companies employing more than 20,000 people. El Segundo names Chevron, Boeing, Mattel and Northrop Grumman among its employers, alongside the LA Kings, the LA Sparks and the Los Angeles Chargers. Santa Monica's employer table reads like a client list of labels, streamers and game studios along Colorado Avenue.

On the Ventura side the mix is industrial, agricultural and institutional. Amgen anchors Thousand Oaks as the largest employer in the Conejo Valley. Patagonia and The Trade Desk are headquartered in Ventura. Naval Base Ventura County is the largest employer in the county. Limoneira has run out of Santa Paula since 1893, and the Port of Hueneme moves automobiles and produce.

Those two lists commission different work. Brand films and artist content dominate on the Los Angeles side. Corporate video, recruitment film and testimonial work dominate on the Ventura side. Real estate video runs the length of both.

We shoot all of it from the same base, which is the practical reason a client on either side gets a crew that has worked the other.

Planning a two city day

Most of our shoot days touch more than one city, so the schedule gets built around light and drive time rather than around a map.

Coastal locations go early or late. The marine layer sits on the shoreline from Malibu to Ventura until mid to late morning and can burn off at different rates ten miles apart, so a beach call at seven is a gamble and a beach call at four is not. Inland locations do the opposite: Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and the Valley cities run hot from June to September, which pushes exteriors into the first three hours of the day.

That gives a natural shape to a two location day. Inland first thing, coastal in the afternoon, with the company move over the middle of the day when the light is least useful anyway.

Drive time is the other constraint. The 101 is the spine of this coverage and it moves in one direction in the morning and the other in the evening, so scheduling against traffic buys back an hour that a client never sees on the invoice.

If your project needs several cities, tell us the locations before the dates. We will usually find an order that costs one shoot day instead of two.