Ellie HensleyStaff Writer- Atlanta Business Chronicle

Five major Georgia film and television studios have partnered to form a formal association called “The Georgia Studio and Infrastructure Alliance.”

The Georgia Studio and Infrastructure Alliance (GSIA) will serve as a legislative and educational advocacy group for studio and production support businesses in Georgia’s film and television industry. Another focus is educating new crew members to develop a more robust crew base, which Georgia sorely needs if it wants to keep productions coming.

The GSIA has also partnered with Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle‘s office and Georgia’s College and Career Academies to develop a training curriculum for film and TV jobs.

The alliance’s members are Eagle Rock Studios Atlanta, EUE/Screen Gems Studios Atlanta, Mailing Avenue Stageworks, Tyler Perry Studios and Triple Horse Studios.

EUE/Screen Gems was the first large “for hire” movie and TV production studio to invest in Georgia back in 2010. It is a 10-stage studio complex with 212,000 square feet of production space at the former Lakewood Fairgrounds, south of downtown Atlanta.

Eagle Rock Studios is a venture of Eagle Rock Distributing Co., a beverage distributor that serves 19 counties in Georgia. It turned its old warehouse in Stone Mountain, Ga., into 65,945 square feet of production space in 2013. On March 22, it will open its second location in Norcross, Ga., which will have four roughly 30,000-square-foot sound stages — more space in a single building than any other studio in metro Atlanta.

Paul Raulet, John Raulet and Tyler Edgarton of Raulet Property Partners started Mailing Avenue Stageworks. Unlike some of their competitors who spend millions building studios from the ground up, the team instead scouts potential in-town properties in neighborhoods that could be revitalized in coming years and become hot spots. That way, if state lawmakers were ever to repeal Georgia’s entertainment tax credits and film productions dried up, the team will have well-located buildings in hip areas they can convert to another use. Mailing Avenue’s first production facility opened near Grant Park in 2012 with 85,000 square feet of stage space, and it recently acquired property on the Westside that it converted to a 52,000-square-foot stage. John Raulet told Atlanta Business Chronicle there is a third location in the works.

Triple Horse Studios in Covington, Ga., has a 52,000-square-foot facility with full production and post-production divisions. It is undergoing a 200,000-square-foot expansion.

Tyler Perry Studios is currently in Southwest Atlanta, where it operates 200,000 square feet of studio space, post-production facilities, sound stages and a back lot. Unlike EUE/Screen Gems, Eagle Rock and Mailing Avenue, Triple Horse and Perry don’t rent stages out to other productions. Perry is in talks to spend $30 million on 330 acres of Fort McPherson, which he would use to build a new studio complex, but the deal has yet to close.

Although the five studios were established to serve productions who came to Georgia because of its film and television credit, they don’t receive the tax credit themselves, but they can qualify for some incentives if they offer in-house production and post-production work. The tax credit only applies to production dollars spent creating movie and TV content.

“This is a group of companies putting capital at risk and hiring employees, many of them Georgians, due to the success of the tax credit,” said Kris Bagwell, executive vice president of EUE/Screen Gems and chairman of the GSIA, in a statement.

Eventually GSIA memberships will be extended to production support businesses like post-production houses, lighting and grip companies and production payroll.

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