The COVID-19 pandemic has halted most of everyone’s source of entertainment — like going to the movies. Consumers resorted to TV shows and movies through streaming services like Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu and countless others.
While some film services soared, some lost — and the film market in Phoenix bloomed.
“Production never stopped, it was always going on,” said film commissioner Philip Bradstock for the city of Phoenix Film Office. “It’s just people were a little bit more reluctant to do liabilities issues and go out there and put projects together so they came up with a lot of protocols, safety protocols in order to be a success.”
The Phoenix Film Office provides location assistance, on-stop film permits and technical assistance. The office has always been open for business and requests, according to commissioner Bradstock.
“It definitely slowed down a bit when it happened — like the rest of the world did — but we still always had projects going on here but not at the level because people were a little bit unsure,” he said. “[Now] so we’re pretty much up to pre-pandemic levels with production, as in how much quantity is coming through.”
The city office largely deals with projects that are not tax eligible.
“What that means is basically we get in a tremendous amount of commercials, photography, reality type TV shows that come in like following a murder case out here,” he said. “We also do a lot of things with ASU because of the astronomy programming issue so TV shows like to come out to do interviews and view them in our parks so there’s like projects — I call them reality TV specials, like a documentary project.”
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The team worked on shooting brands from AutoNation to North Face this past week, and are looking at ten more shoots this week.
Administrative director Julie Lee of Arizona Production Association (APA) manages and runs the business part of the organization. APA is a nonprofit group that focuses on improving job opportunities for its members.
“Most productions went away in 2020, live events included,” director Lee said. “The majority of productions that were already in the can, meaning they had already completed shooting they were able to proceed with post-production, because that can be done remotely.”
As productions roll, some employees and members are getting overworked.
“Some people in the business actually left production entirely and went into other lines of work,” Lee said. “Although in some cases there are now fewer people to do the work. So it’s just some of the specialized areas that are having difficulty keeping up with the workload.”
The organization was able to maintain the majority of its membership because of incentives that were offered.
“We remained pretty, pretty stable,” she said. “We gave our members last year some incentives to remain members, such as an additional couple of months of membership if they paid on time, or an extended grace period if they needed more time to pay their dues, etc.”
The organization was concerned about seeing a “drop” in finance so they took out a small business administration loan but did not need to use any of the funds, according to Lee.
Contact the reporter at yhan99@asu.edu.
Yoori Han was the politics editor at Downtown Devil during fall 2021 and part of spring 2022.
