Producing : Incentives by Terri Morgan

I've been working on scripts, storylines, and what to do for a tv series. I have so much more to do. I've been watching a few shows and reading the credits. That helps me better understand what it took to produce. And for what I want to do, I have to know what the effort and costs might be. There are so very many choices to make and so many things that could happen to increase the budgets. How to manage that? How to lower the risk?

So, I started looking at incentives. Yesterday, I took a workshop from a production accounting firm. It was for CFO types who manage budgets for tv and film productions in the US. And I discovered that there are quite a few states and locales that offer incentives to offset costs - often by quite a lot. There are limits and audits and all sorts of things that have to be addressed, not the least of which is an application package.

I looked at what I was considering for locations, then what those places offered. Some didn't offer much. Others offered quite nice incentives. Now, all I have to do is figure out what I'm actually going to budget for. That's going to take a minute. Audio is so much easier. I have actors and action via dialog. I don't have sets or visuals. I had to figure out how to do a fight scene without showing the fight - chairs breaking, 'ugh' and 'oof', and a table being smashed plus dialog.

To do the same scene for a tv show, I need the two lead characters, eight extras to be the hotel clerk and the 'thugs,' a hotel meeting room with sliding panel dividers, costumes, make-up, lighting, sound, cameras, and runners. I know where I can find the hotel. I don't yet know about all the rest. But it all has to be part of the budget. Having some incentives to offset the costs would let me do so much more. That's the point - the states offering the incentives want to encourage productions and post-production work in their locales.

I found this handy calculator that shows an estimate of the incentives by location.

https://www.ep.com/production-incentives/us/estimator/

So, for my next magic trick, I have to work on the scripts so I have the actual locations and can look at what I might be able do where. Many of the story locations are interior, so I only have to deal with sets and green-screens. Those can be almost anywhere. Other scenes should have external locations to keep them authentic. It won't happen overnight. But I'm more encouraged now that what I'd like to see could happen.