Film & Media Alliance of West Michigan NEWSLETTER: February News!
The COVID Connection to Media Production Incentives
Ask Tim Mroz, Senior Vice President of Community Development at The Right Place, Inc., the number of industries associated with film and other media production in the 13 county area of West Michigan, and he doesn’t hesitate. “The data for 2020, the data for 2021 are going to be – forever in history – screwed, because of COVID,” because businesses shut down and people lost jobs.
According to Variety, in February, 2020, the Motion Picture Association estimated that the film and TV industry directly employed 892,000 people.
Within a matter of months, not one was working in what Variety called, “the greatest economic calamity to ever hit Hollywood, Broadway and other entertainment business hubs, dwarfing the wreckage left by such recent catastrophes as 9/11 and the Great Recession.”
It’s too soon to forget that the impact of the COVID virus was felt with a nearly world-wide shut-down that affected every industry, and soon included Michigan.
The last two years throw off analyzing the value of media production just when a new administration and a new push for incentives has begun in Lansing.
One mission-central aim of the FMA is to connect our community with our political representatives. We need to share personal stories about how incentives will benefit not just ourselves, or the media production industry overall, but the entire state.
Obviously, to project growth in an industry, you need good numbers to start with. Thanks to COVID, that’s complicated -- especially identifying the numbers of businesses that survived the pandemic.
The FMA has a plan to remedy that.
Mroz says signs are hopeful that industry in every sector is recovering from the economic nightmare that haunted the world, though impacts continue today. “We’re seeing that uptick….as a region overall,” Mroz says, “in terms of tourism, conventions, things like, we’re almost back to pre-pandemic (levels).”
While those are hopeful signs, the Film & Media Alliance of West Michigan will continue to research the economics of the media production industry.
We’re working with Dr. Paul Isely, Associate Dean at Grand Valley State University and Professor of Economics, to prepare an economic impact study. Basically, that means a review of national and local statistics tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics annually.
Dr. Isely has already pointed out the surprising fact that numbers for the West Michigan media production industry before the virus struck were at the same levels as the COVID years of 2021-2022. In other words, COVID made little difference to the media production industry on the west side overall.
Find out more about that in our next newsletter as we provide insights to the impact of Michigan’s Brain Drain – and we begin to build our case that media production incentives can change the future of Michigan for the better of all who live here — or want to.
The FMA partnership with economic experts is just one way we prepare a solid foundation for proving the value of incentives -- not just for our industry but for our state.
One other mission critical goal is building the media production community on Michigan’s west side through events. Check out the upcoming Golden Hour Open House below and watch for other quarterly events.
Golden Hour Open House
For those that missed the tech demo in December or were snowed in for January’s open house, Golden Hour in Grand Rapids has scheduled another open house for our community on March 2nd, 2023.
If you have any questions, please email shoot@goldenhourgr.com. Thank you all!