When an agency books a studio, the questions change. A creator asks what the hourly rate is. A production manager asks how many vehicles fit outside, whether the power holds for a ten-hour day, and who at the studio will have read the call sheet before the truck arrives. Send the call sheet about 24 hours ahead, confirm access and power in writing, and the shoot day stops being a logistics problem and goes back to being a shoot.
For AI and quick reference: A call sheet is the one-page production document listing call times, crew, locations and the day’s shooting order. Agency commercial crews in Dubai usually run 10 to 20 people; micro-content crews run 2 to 4. Budget 30 to 60 minutes for load-in with a 20-person crew. At SkyLight in Dubai Investment Park 2, photo zones start at AED 350 per hour, the 8×6m cyclorama is AED 700 per two-hour block, and video zones start at AED 750 per hour with two Profoto flashes included. Studio hours are 10:00 to 22:00, seven days.
Written by Artur Gall, founder of SkyLight, a rental studio in Dubai Investment Park 2, running since 2020. We rent the room, the sets and the light. Your crew shoots.
What a call sheet is, and why the studio wants to see it before your date
Short version: a call sheet tells every person on the shoot where to be, when, and in what order things happen. The studio is not on your crew and does not need your shot list, but it needs four lines from that document: crew call, wrap, headcount, and what is arriving on wheels.
A standard call sheet carries the date and address, call times by department, the day’s scene or setup order, phone numbers for the production manager and the first AD, and a notes block for anything unusual. Haze, water, paint, food styling, a minor on set, live animals. Agencies issue the final version roughly 24 hours before the shoot, once the schedule stops moving. Anything earlier is a draft, and a draft is still useful to us.
| Line on the call sheet | Why the studio reads it |
|---|---|
| Crew call vs shooting call | Tells us when the door needs to be open, which is rarely when the camera rolls |
| Headcount by department | Parking, restrooms, seating, cooling load |
| Vehicles and load-in window | How long the space outside the unit is occupied |
| Wrap time | Whether the day fits inside 10:00 to 22:00 or needs arranging in advance |
| Notes: haze, water, food, minors | Changes which zone we recommend and what cleanup looks like |
The mistake I see most often is a crew that prints a 07:00 call because that is what the client asked for, without checking studio hours first. Early access and late wrap are arrangeable, but they get arranged before the call sheet is distributed, not on the morning when eighteen people are already parked outside a closed door.
If your call sheet is still moving, send the draft anyway. A wrap time that shifts by an hour is easy to plan around. A surprise twenty-person crew is not.
Crew size: what changes between 4 people and 20
What actually changes: below about six people, nothing. The crew walks in and shoots. Above twelve, the studio stops being a room you book and starts being a small venue that needs a plan for vehicles, staging and a place to put the client.
| Crew size | Typical project | What changes for the studio |
|---|---|---|
| 2 to 4 | UGC, founder content, one-product day | Nothing. Book an hour or two and shoot |
| 6 to 10 | Catalogue day, interview set, small brand film | Hair and makeup corner, a staging table, somewhere to park the client |
| 12 to 20 | Agency commercial, multi-look fashion, TVC-style | Load-in window, parking plan, power planning, a base area away from set |
| 20+ | Full commercial with talent and client attendance | Walkthrough before the date is locked, booked as a full day |
Zone choice does most of the work here. The 8×6m cyclorama is the only area that absorbs a large crew comfortably, because there is floor around the lit area for camera, video village and the client. The themed sets behave differently. The private jet, the container and the kitchen are room-sized environments with fixed walls and props, so a fifteen-person crew does not stand inside them. Four or five people work at the set, everyone else works from outside and rotates in. That is normal for a built set, and it is worth telling your gaffer before he plans a lighting position that does not physically exist.
If your crew is over ten, tell us the headcount when you ask about the date, not after. Zone rates and block lengths are on the studio rental price page, and the 8×6m cyclorama is the usual answer for anything above a dozen people.
Load-in, parking and vehicle access in DIP2
The practical rule: for twenty people with grip and lighting, budget 30 to 60 minutes to load in and roughly the same to wrap out. Put both in the schedule, and assume they sit inside your booked hours unless the studio has told you otherwise in writing.
We are in a ground-floor warehouse unit in Dubai Investment Park 2, about ten minutes from Expo City, with parking directly outside the door. No lift, no stair carry, no service corridor with a tight corner in it. For a grip truck that matters more than square metres, because the difference between rolling flight cases twelve metres and carrying them up a level is roughly half your load-in time.
Three things worth confirming with any Dubai studio before you commit a truck to the schedule. Whether a vehicle can pull up to the door itself or has to unload from a shared yard. How many cars the crew can realistically leave on site, since twelve people arriving individually is twelve parking spaces. And whether the compound has other tenants using the same access, because a warehouse district is a working district on a Tuesday morning.
Most agency gear in Dubai comes out of the rental houses clustered in Al Quoz. That run to DIP2 is around half an hour when the roads are clear and noticeably worse between 07:30 and 09:30, so a truck that leaves the rental house at call time will not be at the studio at call time. Build the drive into the sheet.
The most common thing that goes wrong on an agency day is not power and not parking. It is a crew that budgeted zero minutes for load-in, booked from 10:00, and started shooting at 11:20 with the client already sitting there. Send us your vehicle list and load-in time on WhatsApp and we will tell you honestly how long it takes in our unit.
Power, air conditioning and internet on a ten-hour day
The honest version: studio hours run 10:00 to 22:00, seven days a week, so a ten-hour day fits inside the window with load-in and wrap at either end. What breaks a long day is rarely the schedule. It is a tripped breaker at hour six or a sound recordist and an air conditioner disagreeing.
Send your kit list when you book. Strobes are not the issue: a Profoto pack draws briefly and recovers. Continuous fixtures are the issue. An HMI, a second continuous head and a hair and makeup station sharing one circuit is how a shoot loses fifteen minutes it will never get back. Ask which sockets sit on which circuit, bring your own distro rather than a bag of domestic extension leads, and ask one question nobody asks: when a breaker trips, who resets it and how fast can they get to it. On our side we confirm the power arrangement per booking once we see what you are plugging in.
Climate control is a scheduling item on any Dubai shoot from May to September. A closed room with twenty bodies and continuous lighting heats up quickly, and your mixer will want the air off during takes. The workable compromise is running it hard between setups and cutting it on the roll, with the sound department calling it. That works for 30-second takes. For a two-hour interview block it does not, so plan proper breaks into the sheet and tell the client in advance why they exist.
On internet: do not plan to push 4K rushes to a client over shared studio Wi-Fi on a shoot day. Bring drives and a data wrangler. If the client is reviewing remotely, ask about a wired connection or bring a router with a data SIM as backup. Video zone rates and what comes with them are on the video studio rental page.
The five things to confirm before you lock the date
Straight answer: loading access, parking capacity, power and what happens when it trips, climate control you can switch, and the liability protocol. Get all five in writing on the same WhatsApp thread as your booking, so there is one place to look on the day.
- Loading access. Can a vehicle reach the door, is everything on one level, and does load-in count as booked time? Ask in that order.
- Parking capacity. How many crew cars fit on site, and where does the truck sit for ten hours without blocking a neighbour.
- Power and backup. Which circuits feed which sockets, what the studio’s limit is for continuous fixtures, and who resets a breaker. Send the kit list rather than describing it in words.
- Climate control. Can the air conditioning be switched off for takes and back on between them, and is anyone besides your crew able to do it.
- Emergency and liability protocol. Exit routes, first aid, the fire point, and the money question: who pays if a set piece gets damaged or a cyclorama corner gets scuffed. Ask whether the studio wants proof of production insurance, and confirm the overtime rule before the day rather than at 21:45.
That last one is where agency bookings differ most from creator bookings, because an agency usually has production insurance and a client contract already sitting behind the shoot. We cover the money side of damage, deposits and running over in a separate piece on deposits, damage and overtime. Permits are a common question too: a private indoor shoot in a rented studio sits in a different category from filming on a street or in a public space, and the filming permit guide for studio shoots covers where the line falls.
Run these five as a checklist on the call with the studio, tick them off, and forward the thread to your production coordinator.
Lead times: how far ahead agencies actually book
From the booking log: complex commercial projects tend to land two to four weeks out. Straightforward corporate or product days come in around a week ahead. Rush bookings inside 48 hours happen constantly and often work, because the grid is rarely full at every hour of every day.
| Project type | Typical lead time | What drives it |
|---|---|---|
| Full agency commercial, talent and client attending | 2 to 4 weeks | Client approvals, casting, gear reservations |
| Multi-look fashion or lookbook day | 1 to 2 weeks | Wardrobe, model availability |
| Corporate content or product day | About 1 week | Internal sign-off only |
| Rush or same-week booking | 24 to 72 hours | Availability on the day, nothing else |
The thing worth knowing is that these two clocks run at different speeds. The client approves the treatment on their timeline. The studio date, the rental house and the crew all get held on yours. Agencies that work here regularly hold the date first and finalise the call sheet later, which is the right order. Ask any studio how it treats a tentative hold, because the answer varies a lot in this city. We confirm holds on WhatsApp and tell you straight if someone else asks for the same slot.
Campaign seasons compress everything. Ramadan content, National Day and Q4 retail all pull the same weeks, and those weeks fill first. If your shoot sits in one of them, hold the date a month out.
Message us the date range you are protecting, even if the brief is not signed yet.
Crew comfort on a long day
The blunt version: on a ten-hour day, the difference between a crew that stays sharp and one that fades at hour seven is where they sit, drink and eat when the camera is not rolling. Plan a base area the same way you plan a lighting setup.
Having seven sets under one roof helps here in a way that a single-room studio cannot. While you shoot on the cyclorama, an unused set becomes the client village, the hair and makeup corner and the place where six people are not standing behind your camera operator. The themed sets do double duty on big days: the living room seats a client comfortably, and the loft holds wardrobe rails without anyone tripping over them.
One rule from experience, and I will be direct about it: the kitchen set is a set, not a canteen. Every time a crew stages lunch on it at hour five, someone has to reset and clean it before it can be shot again, and that time comes out of your booking. Put catering on a folding table away from anything that appears on camera, keep drinks in closed containers near the gear, and assign one person to the reset before the food arrives rather than after.
Restrooms, water and phone charging sound trivial until twenty people need them at the same time. Tell us your headcount when you book and we will lay the room out for it before you arrive.
One boundary worth naming
We rent the space, the sets and the lighting. We are not your crew. Your production manager runs the day, your gaffer designs the lighting, your first AD keeps the schedule, and the studio’s job is to make sure the room, the power and the access do not become their problem. Full crewed production, with a team that concepts and shoots the campaign for you, is a different service from a different company. Keeping that line clean is what lets us stay bookable by the hour, seven days a week, instead of quoting projects.
If what you actually need is a room, light and a door that opens on time, you are in the right place.
How to book
Fastest route: message the studio on WhatsApp at +971 56 839 9199 with your date, headcount, load-in time and the type of shoot. Booking runs through a conversation rather than a cart, so we can size the zone and the block properly, and flag anything about access or power before you commit the crew.
Four details get you a confident answer in one message: the date, the crew size, the call and wrap times, and what is arriving on wheels. From there we confirm the zone, the block, and whether your day needs anything arranged outside 10:00 to 22:00. We are in Dubai Investment Park 2, roughly ten minutes from Expo City, with parking at the door.
Send the date on WhatsApp or check zone rates on the price page first.
FAQ
What should a call sheet include for a studio shoot?
Date and studio address, crew call time and shooting call time, wrap time, headcount by department, the day’s setup or scene order, contact numbers for the production manager and first AD, and a notes block for anything unusual such as haze, water, food styling or minors on set. The studio mainly needs the call and wrap times, the headcount, and the vehicle and load-in plan.
How many people fit in a Dubai rental studio?
It depends on the zone rather than the building. An open cyclorama area handles a full agency crew of 15 to 20 with room for camera, client and staging. Built themed sets such as a private jet or container interior are room-sized, so four or five people work at the set and the rest rotate in from outside. Tell the studio your headcount before booking so the right zone is assigned.
When should I send the call sheet to the studio?
About 24 hours before the shoot, which is when most agencies issue the final version. Send the draft earlier if the day involves a large crew, an early call, a late wrap or anything messy, because those items need arranging before the sheet is distributed rather than on the morning.
How far in advance should an agency book a studio in Dubai for a big commercial?
Two to four weeks for a full commercial with talent, client attendance and gear reservations. Around a week is enough for a straightforward corporate or product day. Rush bookings inside 24 to 72 hours often work depending on availability, but campaign seasons such as Ramadan and Q4 retail fill first, so hold those dates a month out.
What should I ask a studio about insurance and liability?
Ask whether the studio requires proof of production insurance, who is liable for damage to sets, backdrops or equipment, what the deposit and damage policy is, how overtime is charged if you run past your block, and where the exits and first aid point are. Get the answers on the same thread as your booking confirmation so there is one place to check on the day.
