Video Production in Long Beach, CA

Oil under Signal Hill paid for the city you shoot in

Long Beach incorporated on 13 December 1897 and then struck oil. The 1921 discovery on Signal Hill turned the Long Beach Oil Field into the most productive in the world through the 1920s, and the Wilmington field followed in 1932. That money built the civic architecture, the port and the wide boulevards that a camera reads today as a city much larger than fifty square miles of land.

The shape is unusual. The city covers 77.84 square miles in total, only 50.71 of it land, with the rest water, at 52 feet of elevation, twenty one miles south of downtown Los Angeles. It completely surrounds the separate city of Signal Hill, so a location that looks like Long Beach can sit inside a different jurisdiction, and the Los Angeles River runs out through it to the harbor.

The older stock is still standing where it matters. Casa de los Cerritos, the ranch house built in 1844, predates the city by half a century. The Pike ran as an amusement zone from 1902 to 1969 and the pier is documented from 1905. Between the harbor cranes, the Queen Mary, the shoreline and the residential grid, this is the most varied single city in our coverage, and it is the reason a production that needs three unrelated looks in one day comes here rather than to the Westside. We shoot commercial work, live event coverage around the waterfront venues, and corporate video for the logistics and aerospace employers on the harbor side.

A city that publishes its own studio zone status

The studio zone is a 30 mile radius used by union film projects to set per diem rates and driving distances for crew. The California Film Commission puts its centre at the southeast corner of Beverly and La Cienega in Los Angeles, and is careful to state that it does not administer the boundary, pointing productions instead to the Contract Services map and the applicable union agreements.

Because nobody official administers it, in-zone status is normally argued rather than cited. Long Beach is the exception in this county. Long Beach Airport publishes, on the city's own site, that it has been the scene of various features, television projects and commercials, and that it is located within the Studio Zone with various locations convenient for studio and independent productions.

That is a city-published, on-the-record statement, and it is the one to quote when a union budget question comes up on a Long Beach day.

Boeing is eighth on the city's own schedule

One number circulates about Long Beach that should not be repeated: Boeing at roughly 10,400 employees. It comes from budget documents around FY06 and FY07 and it is two decades stale.

The City's audited FY2025 principal employers schedule ranks the actual list. Long Beach Unified School District leads with 12,217 employees, 5.17 percent of total city employment. The City of Long Beach follows at 6,010, Long Beach Memorial Medical Center at 4,664, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center at 3,851, California State University Long Beach at 3,534, Long Beach City College at 2,385 and the CSULB Research Foundation at 1,755. The Boeing Company sits eighth at 1,609. St. Mary Medical Center is ninth at 1,595 and Molina Healthcare tenth at 474.

Molina is worth a second look, because it is headquartered here. It reports its principal executive offices to the Securities and Exchange Commission at 200 Oceangate, Suite 100. Rocket Lab reports 3881 McGowen Street, Long Beach, classified under guided missiles and space vehicles. A headquarters and a headcount are different things, and a commissioning budget follows the headquarters. Education, healthcare, aerospace and a public university is a client base built for corporate and internal communications work, recruitment films and testimonial work rather than for stage-based production.

The port number that is not a Long Beach number

The City states that the Port of Long Beach continues to be a world class green port, that it holds one of the highest credit ratings of any U.S. seaport, and that it provides employment to over 691,000 people in Southern California.

Read that last figure precisely. It is a Southern California number, not a Long Beach number, and it appears misquoted as local employment often enough to be worth stating plainly. The City describes its own economic base as international trade, aerospace, aviation, healthcare, education and tourism.

Long Beach is a charter city, incorporated in 1897 within the County of Los Angeles, with an estimated 462,561 residents, which makes it the seventh most populous city in the state. That resident base, and the housing stock behind it, is why property films here are a volume category rather than an occasional one.

Fifty square miles, and the venues in the audit

The city publishes that Long Beach has over 50 square miles of film friendly areas, while noting that some areas are more popular than others and may carry filming limitations as a result. Location questions go to the office directly.

The City's audited 2025 report names its own Tidelands Trust operations: the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center, the Queen Mary, the Rainbow Harbor area, the marinas and beach maintenance, plus the Aquarium of the Pacific. The same report records the Queen Mary as being fully operational. For an event organiser, that is a convention centre, a ship, a harbour and an aquarium under city-connected operation in one coastal district.

The airport carries its own credentials in the same report: a 100th anniversary, 3.8 million passengers during the fiscal year, a USA Today top ten placing, a trademark as America's Coolest Airport, and a role serving travellers for the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Visit Long Beach, the city's destination marketing organisation, adds its own production claims: Iron Man, Knight and Day, Transformers 2 and 3 and the latest Star Trek film, plus doubling for Miami in Dexter and CSI Miami. It also notes the city is located less than 30 miles from Hollywood production studios.

From Westlake Village the route runs US-101 east to I-405 south to I-710 south, around 55 miles and 65 to 100 minutes. That is a freeway routing approximation, not a published figure, and it is the longest haul to any city covered here. El Segundo sits partway down the same corridor with its own Finance Department permit, and the Los Angeles County overview covers which office holds which city.