LED Dance Floor Rental — Feature Film Shoot, Syracuse NY

The challenge: A production company, Film Six LLC, was shooting the feature The Binge on a built set in Syracuse and needed a lit dance floor as the centerpiece of a party sequence. Film work is a different order of problem from an event. The floor is not there for one night — it is there for a week of shooting days, it has to look identical from take to take, and it has to survive whatever the scene requires while a camera is pointed at it from a foot away.

What we delivered: A 12ft x 20ft raised LED platform — 60 panels — built on the set, plus an on-site technician for every shooting day. That last part is the real deliverable. A film crew cannot wait on a vendor phone call when the lighting needs to change between setups, so our tech stayed with the floor for the run of the shoot.

The 12ft by 20ft LED dance floor lit in blue and pink stripes and buried under confetti on the film set in Syracuse

The lighting brief was open: our booking note for this job literally reads “lighting pattern unclear.” That is normal for film — the look gets decided on the day, by people standing in the room looking through a lens. Because every panel is individually addressable, that was fine: the floor ran clean white, banded stripes, solid cyan, magenta and green across the shoot, and each look could be dialed in and then held exactly for as many takes as the scene needed.

What the floor actually had to take: confetti by the bagful, a full crowd of extras dancing on it take after take, and — in one sequence — a live alligator, walked across the deck by its handlers while the floor stayed lit underneath it. In nine years of building these, that is still the only time one of our floors has been asked to do that.

The 12ft by 20ft raised LED platform lit solid cyan on the film set, surrounded by scaffolding and set dressing
Background extras dancing on the lit LED floor during a party scene take, with the set lighting rig around them
A live alligator being walked across the green-lit LED dance floor by handlers, with camera track laid alongside the platform

Job Specs

Floor
12ft x 20ft raised LED platform — 60 panels (2ft x 2ft each)
Lighting
Full-color LED, individually addressable panels, re-set between camera setups
Crew
On-site technician for every shooting day
Production
Film Six LLC — the feature film The Binge
Location
Montgomery Street, Syracuse, NY (Onondaga County)
Run
On set the week of October 1–7, 2019