Real Estate Video in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica

I film houses on the Landes coast, in south-west France. From 25 September 2026 I'm based in Santa Teresa, on the Nicoya Peninsula, and I'll be doing the same work from there.

This page is the overview: what goes into a property film, what I'm bringing across unchanged, and what the tropics will make me rework.

Who watches, and on what

A property film is usually opened on a phone, in the evening, by someone who is somewhere else entirely. On this coast that tends to be literal. The buyer is in Montreal or Munich and the house is above the Pacific.

They've already looked at the photographs. Those carry the first impression, they're read in a second, and a good set of them does a great deal on its own. The film picks up where they stop: how the rooms lead into each other, how far the land goes back, what the place sounds like early in the morning.

How the film is built

Wide first, so the viewer knows where they are. Then the building, outside in. Then the life of the place: the terrace, the pool, the kitchen with light coming across it.

Bedrooms go in the middle. They rarely decide anything, and past the second one they start to resemble each other, so I put them where attention naturally dips and keep the opening and the close for what holds someone.

Depth is what I look for in a frame. There's nearly always an object worth placing in the foreground, and at 48 mm you get a parallax as the camera moves that flatter framing doesn't give. Higher-end houses help: wide openings, a lot of daylight, real volume to work with.

The drone, and where it stops

I fly a Mini 4 Pro. Flying over a neighbour's land isn't something I do, and plots are rarely convenient rectangles: a fair share of the work is building a movement that shows the property properly while staying inside its own boundary. Arcs that stop short. Rises that lean away.

I also give up shots. On one property the gusts were too strong for a clean pass over the water, so I came back the next morning and got them. That's nearly always the better answer.

Costa Rican drone rules are their own subject, and I'll read them properly before the first flight rather than assume they resemble the French ones.

What changes at 9° north

Santa Teresa sits close to the equator. The sun climbs much higher at midday and the evening is short, so the long slow end of day I plan French shoots around doesn't exist there in the same form. The hour still decides the film. There's simply less of it, and no room to try three things and keep the best.

Then the architecture. Houses on that coast open completely: sliding walls, roofed terraces, a pool running into the garden, trees a few metres behind. You're seldom inside a room in the French sense. You're in a space that's half deep shade and half full sun, with a wider gap between the two than anything I meet in the Landes.

And humidity, which I've never had to plan around. Warm wet air on cool glass fogs straight away. Letting the gear reach ambient temperature before a housing is opened costs twenty minutes if you plan for it, and an hour if you don't.

Three languages, one property

Buyers here come from several countries, and so do the people renting. A film without dialogue travels well by itself, but what surrounds it has to hold up in more than one language: the listing text, the page it sits on, subtitles where there are any.

I build websites as well as film, so that side of it stays inside the same conversation rather than becoming a second supplier to coordinate.

What I'm not saying yet

I haven't filmed a house in Costa Rica. Everything above comes from craft that transfers, from properties I've actually shot in France, and from things anyone can check: latitude, orientation, how humidity behaves on glass.

What I don't have is the local eye. Which details a buyer in that market looks for. What the wet season does to a garden, and to a shooting week. Which hour someone who's lived there ten years would tell me to be on site.

I'll rewrite this page once I've filmed a few houses down there, and that version will be worth more than this one.

If you're on the peninsula and want to talk about a property before then, the offers and the form are on this page.