Increasingly driven by the California Film & Television Tax Credit Program, Scripted television production remains a bright spot in the L.A. production picture. In the latest quarterly data from FilmLA, on-location filming within that jobs-rich sector increased while feature, commercial and reality TV production decreased.
In the second quarter of 2019, 51.7 percent of local TV Drama Shoot Days (SD) came from incentivized series. Meanwhile, recent incentive projects such as Animal Kingdom, Ballers, Euphoria, Westworld and Why Women Kill power 20.8 percent of L.A.’s on-location TV Comedy production. On-location filming in Greater Los Angeles fell 3.9 percent with only 8,632 SD logged for that period.
According to the FilmLA report, lack of vacant soundstages is seen as the main cause of the lack of growth in the Feature and Commercial production. Feature film production decreased 16.7 percent for the second quarter to 986 SD. Commercial production, which receives no state-level incentive support, dropped 19.8 percent to 1,280 SD. Incentivized film projects such as Covers, Island Plaza, Main Stream, Palm Springs, SJ2, Torrance and The Walk contributed 9.7 percent, or 96 SD, to the Feature category.
To learn more information, or for FilmLA’s quarterly reports, please visit www.filmla.com
