What would you want from local government?

I have coming up an interesting meeting with the development agency and Council of my home city. I am talking to them about what they can do to make the city ready and encourage it as an industry specialist city in film and media. Now I have certain ideas about where I see the industry of film making going in the modern digital world but i was wondering what exactly would you lot as film makers from your local governments to encourage film making in your area and create a sustainable creative culture infrastructure for independent film making (I know the real answer is money but try to think of something different).

For any of you new to this idea of thinking of the industry as a whole check out Ted Hope and his ideas as I'm pretty much in full agreement with him on most points. There's 2 fantastic podcasts from him doing the rounds at the moment.

So what would you want to change the industry and do you have any innovative ideas?

This is a good place to start as they have been doing it for a while...

http://www.nyc.gov/html/film/html/permi ... home.shtml

create a sustainable creative culture infrastructure for independent film making

Hi Michael,

These are the sort of questions my series of events (called Film Means Business) tries to address. My next event has the BFI (took over duties from the ex-UK Film Council) who have just launched Film Forever £500m investment scheme. Link to the event is here:

http://www.filmmeansbusiness.com/events.aspx

This event is also loaded with top producers on the panel. Be quite a few producers/co-producers attending and investors, filmmakers etc. They would have plenty of answers I'm sure.

Cheers,
Jules

Cheers guys. I will read all these through.


What I also want is personal wants and ideas from the forum.

Michael,

I'm living in Atlanta, Georgia and it seems the last few years Hollywood has left LA and moved to Georgia!
The state gives tax breaks and incentives to lure filmmakers to work here.. The state offers great locations from full-on big city skylines, the suburbs, small towns, farmlands.. to the sticks.. Plus are a ton of film professionals in town to crew your production.
Screen Gems just opened a huge studio here, as well as Tyler Perry among others and Panavision Cameras re-opened their office here... it's not uncommon to drive by a live set in just about any town in metro Atlanta, Macon, Savannah.. etc.. as well as sighting big name actors around town..

Here's a great article explaining how the state/city brings in the big productions.. http://www.atlantaintownpaper.com/2012/ ... n-atlanta/
This is also a GREAT website and resource..
http://www.georgia.org/industries/enter ... films.aspx

I hope that helps.

just off the top of my head 2 popular shows that film here besides ALL the Tyler Perry productions are "The Vampire Diaries" and "The Walking Dead"

Hello I'm from Spain. My hometown is Terrassa (30km from Barcelona) and we have the "luck" to have a wonderful city with an awesome place wich was an old hospital right now abandoned. So our cityhall thought it could be nice to the city become "the city of cinema" in Catalonia and in Spain. The project started quite well since many companies (Filmax mainly) decided to stablish an office in there.

So everything was looking really good, even the film archive and the film school came to the town. Many hollywood studios and film were interested in this place, since it's very well comunicated with the airport and Barcelona city. In about 20 minutes you reach from the airport to the town, so films, comercials and music videos started to be shot here. I was reallly really happy with that, with having a film city just 5 minutes from my house.

Then, our city government thought to itself "hey man, this looks really promising...Why don't we rise all the taxes to a level where nobody will want to come here?"... and that's what they did and then Valencia appered with "la ciudad de la luz" where taxes were virtually none, so most of the things moved there.

The situation right now is that there are thing such as films, comercials, music videos thar are shot here in my town but not as much as could be done. Las october I was there shooting a movie called "grand piano" starred by elijah wood and jon cusak .I was as an extra .

So, here i give you links:

This is Ciudad de la Luz in Valencia http://web.ciudaddelaluz.com/EN (this is where the movie "The impossible" was shot)
This is in my home town, Parc Audiovisual de Catalunya http://www.parcaudiovisual.cat/idioma-M ... ngles.html

So, this is my story, I hope you read it all

Jesus

Brilliant, and cheers guys. Yes I did read it all Jesus.