There isn't a window anywhere in the barn. No skylights, no roof lights, not a pane of glass. Every bit of light in a photograph taken here came off a lamp that somebody switched on, aimed and dimmed.
I think that is the best thing about the building.
Four o'clock looks exactly like eleven
A lamp does what it did an hour ago. The sky doesn't. Shoot a presenter at eleven and the reverse angle at four, and the two cut together because nothing outside has moved. There is no cloud to wait for halfway through a take, no creeping change of colour as the afternoon goes on, and nobody standing at the door checking the weather.
A full day on the cove is ten hours, and it looks the same at both ends. That matters most to people who come back. Say a brand shoots its range here in spring and again in autumn: the white behind the product is the same white, lit by the same sixteen 500W floods at the same levels on the desk, and the new pictures match the old ones.
The curtain isn't there to keep light out
There is a curtain track right round the cove, and you would assume it exists to keep light out. There is nothing outside to keep out. It is there because the barn is pale inside: pale oak trusses and rafters, white panels between them, a white cove. Our own light bounces off all of it. Draw the black curtain round the perimeter, which takes about twenty minutes, and the room stops handing our light back to us. Now nothing is lit unless a lamp is pointed at it.
That is how night gets shot at two in the afternoon. It is also how a stainless steel DeLorean with its gullwing doors up could be lit in coloured haze while reflecting only what we put in front of it, and none of the building.
What the barn's first job left behind
The barn was built to store grain, and it has been a working studio since 2005. The bones of that first job are what a studio needs.
Height, for a start. There are 4.5 metres from the floor to the lighting grid, enough for those gullwing doors to open fully with a light above them. Then volume: room to build a whole cottage interior inside, which our construction team did over five days for a Channel 4 drama directed by Tim Pope. And a floor that takes vehicles, through doors 2.4 metres wide and 4.5 metres high at ground level.
That cottage had a practical window in it. The weather on the other side was whatever the gaffer decided it was, and it stayed that way. The set was shot over several days, and drama is unforgiving about continuity: a wall lit warm on the first morning has to be the same wall on the last afternoon. Under a grid, with the doors shut, it is.
A rig that has to do the sky's job
With no windows, the rig does everything, so I specified and hung it to cover the lot. Faces get 1.2kW fresnels, the cove gets its floods, and colour comes from six Arri L3-C LEDs, all of it on an eight-bar grid at 4.5 metres, with 42 channels of dimming for the tungsten and the LEDs cued from the desk. It comes with the hire of the White Space, so nobody arrives to an empty grid.
How that rig takes the cove to a clean white or a full black is in lighting an infinity cove. Why so much of it is still tungsten is in tungsten and LED.
The honest downside
A room with no windows is a poor place to spend a day learning something. Nobody wants a workshop in a sealed black box, which is why the Grain Hopper, our meeting and events room, is in the office block next door and not in the barn. It is a bright, ordinary room under a hexagonal LED ceiling, kept for the days that are about people rather than pictures.
The other downside is that you cannot borrow anything. Every bit of light costs a lamp, a dimmer channel and someone who knows where to point it. For a producer that is the appeal. What gets planned is what gets shot, at nine in the morning or seven at night.
If you would like to see the cove with the curtain drawn, ask when you get in touch and we will show you round.
More from the Journal
- Christmas photoshoots at the barn: four weekends, twenty minutes each
- UK production spend fell in the first half of 2026. UK-made films went the other way
- Lighting a show that's being filmed: what to tell your lighting designer
- All Journal articles
Ready when you are
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Questions we get asked
Does the studio have any windows?
No. The barn has no windows, skylights or roof lights, so every bit of light comes off a lamp, and the cove can go to a full black box in about twenty minutes.
granary.digital · 01243 884993 · studio@granary.digital · The Old Grainstore, Adsdean, Chichester, West Sussex, PO18 9DN · Prices exclude VAT unless marked inc VAT