Fifteen years ago, KJ Jennings became a film commissioner at a regional start-up film office in a south island of New Zealand. The local government had noticed a lot of film production around the area and wanted to enable this to grow bigger.
When COVID-19 began to impact the film industry, producer Kirk Zeller was tasked with an unprecedented challenge: shoot an entire film with a remote director across multiple states that followed safety protocols.
Stacy Heatherly, the volunteer Eastern Nebraska Film Commissioner, has successfully enacted incentives for productions and has demonstrated how to attract productions during the ongoing pandemic.
