Image-based lighting in Action: Tabletop Filming for Disney+ at Haddenham Studio
When the production team behind the Disney+ true crime docuseries Welcome to the Family: The Murder of Dan Markel needed a space to shoot some highly stylised tabletop sequences, they booked Haddenham Studio. True crime relies heavily on atmosphere often needing interstitial stylised shots to tie the film together.
For this shoot, our secret weapon wasn’t just the studio space itself—it was our advanced setup for image-based lighting (IBL) and pixel mapping.
Taking Tabletop Filming to the Next Level
If you’re a DP or director looking for a studio to film tabletop work, you’ll know that traditional, static lighting can sometimes feel a bit flat on camera. To give the evidence close-ups and macro shots in Welcome to the Family a dynamic, lived-in feel, we leaned heavily into pixel mapping.
By feeding moving textures and video files directly into our LED fixtures, we created realistic, shifting reflections on the tabletop props. Rather than just pointing a light through a gel, pixel mapping allows our rig to mimic real-world environments—whether that’s the soft glow of a streetlamp passing a window, the flicker of a television screen, or subtle, shifting shadows. It gives the camera genuine, organic movement to capture.
Powered by the Obsidian NX1
The real benefit of shooting these kinds of setups at Haddenham Studio is that all of this lighting technology is available completely in-house. There’s no need to cross-hire expensive control desks, bring in external programmers, or spend hours patching fixtures just to get a pixel-mapped sequence working.
Every light used on this Disney+ shoot ran straight off our Obsidian NX1 lighting console. Thanks to the desk’s built-in Dylos pixel engine, mapping complex video files onto the studio’s LED grid was incredibly straightforward. It meant we could tweak the speed, colour, and intensity of the image-based lighting in real time, keeping the production rolling without any technical headaches.
Our upgraded lighting grid is fully programmed, mapped, and ready to bring your vision to life.
Accessible, In-House Image-Based Lighting
Historically, image-based lighting has been seen as a complex, high-budget technique—usually requiring external specialists, media servers, and expensive hired kit to pull off. At Haddenham Studio, we’ve changed that. Because our entire pixel mapping ecosystem is built into the studio’s infrastructure and runs natively through our in-house control desk, the process is streamlined and highly cost-effective. You get the premium, dynamic look of image-based lighting without the prohibitive technical setup or the need for a separate budget line, making it accessible for productions of all sizes.
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