San Diego Film Office Reopens With New Guidelines And Tools For Shooting In A Pandemic

Speaker 1: 00:00 COVID-19 shut down the film industry, but now the city of San Diego's film office is back open with new guidelines for working in the pandemic and new tools for anyone who wants to shoot here. KPBS arts reporter, Beth Armando speaks with filming program manager, Brandy Shimabukuro Speaker 2: 00:18 Brandy. Before we talk about what you're doing right now, I wanted to give people a little context. So back in 1976, Pete Wilson created the San Diego film commission, but that was essentially gutted back in 2012. So explain what's been happening since then to kind of fill in the gap for the missing film commission. As I think, as you know, the original San Diego film commission was one of the oldest establishment commissions in the country having been established in 1976, it started off as part of the chamber of commerce, and then it spun off as an independent organization and really brought in an enormous amount of filming to the region and partnership with Sue Siegel productions and established down soundstage in Kearny Mesa. A lot of things led to its disillusion, but from 2012 onward, the city of San Diego, what was then called the office of special events, took on kind of the core functions of at least permitting, um, the permitting aspects of what the old firm commission would do. Speaker 2: 01:14 And then mayor Faulkner and city council in 2015, advocated for the reemergence of the San Diego film office. Part of that was the creation of my role as the filming program manager within what ultimately became the special events and filming department within the city of San Diego. The intent had been to bring back the core functions and to truly market and promote San Diego was a filming destination. And that's what we've been doing ever since. Um, and in each of our city departments, we are tapping folks who are supporting filming in parks, beaches, peers at city lakes, at libraries and other city facilities. And ultimately providing support for help productions can get the shot that they want or that they need throughout the region. So you kind of had to almost start from scratch or reboot this division for focusing on film here in San Diego. Speaker 2: 02:08 So what was that like? You know, the first thing that I did when I came on board was I wanted to get a handle on where San Diego fit in terms of benchmarking. What were some of the top, uh, filming destinations across the country doing right? What were, what services could we provide them? Where did we need to fill the gaps? And we determined pretty quickly that a lot of it comes down to concierge services to productions marketing. San Diego is a destination through if through advocacy and through actual support and having a presence at industry trade shows and conferences, but also providing online services like eat permitting, or a location gallery so that we could showcase all of the diverse locations San Diego has to offer and bringing a, what we're calling a real crew production directory online, so that when productions do want to film in San Diego, we can show them that we do have a robust crew base here and that we want people to work here in San Diego, instead of having to go to another destination to film, Speaker 3: 03:04 Essentially had to reboot the San Diego film commission. And then we also got hit by this pandemic. So how has that impacted you? And what has filming been like here in San Diego since the pandemic hit, Speaker 2: 03:15 When everything shut down, back in March, it ultimately stalled the film industry across the board. Um, we certainly saw it here in San Diego and for most of April and may, a lot of productions were looking at how can they provide a safe work environment for their cast and crew and the state hadn't yet reopened or allowed production to come back online. Uh, that changed in June. And we had an idea having talks every week with other film commissions and film offices statewide through the film is on some California statewide association, uh, which we are a member of. And we were all looking at resources. What guidelines can we set in place so that we can allow production to come back online? How do we provide the resources to production so that they can come back and that they can safely shoot on location or on private property? Speaker 2: 04:07 Production does look different these days. We are only allowing right now, smaller productions of casting crew counts of 15 or less. While we have been hearing from larger productions that are interested in filming later in the year, the bulk of what we have been seeing, filming on location in San Diego has been smaller. Commercial shoots, documentaries, docu series, um, small reality shoots filming. That's a lot more low impact. And what production ultimately looks like is you're taking an industry that thrives on close contact and in person meetups, because you're filming on location, typically cast and crew counts would be far, far larger than your typical threshold of 15. Um, so a lot of productions are utilizing what's called zones where there's minimal mixing. People are actively doing health monitoring every single day. That is a requirement that we are doing physical distancing of course is required masks before people who are on location a is there also a requirement with the exception being for talent who are actively being filmed in front of the camera. So, um, but we've seen this before. The film industry will not depend on it. We haven't seen the pandemic before, but we've seen that the film industry across the board can be extremely flexible and they have really risen to the challenge of how to come back to work and do it safely. Speaker 3: 05:26 And one of the interesting things you've created recently is this film permit zoning map, which will help people who are looking to shoot here in San Diego. Speaker 2: 05:35 Absolutely. I'm, I'm really excited about this and maybe it's just because I'm a mapping geek. Um, and, and I do need to acknowledge the incredible work from the city's department of its, um, GIS mapping team, because they were the ones who really built this from the ground up, what this tool is, and we're calling it the San Diego filming jurisdiction map. So what it ultimately is is it's an interactive map that's available online, it's free and open to the public to access. And we have it linked on SD film.org on our website. But when you open it up, if a production has a list of locations and they aren't sure who they need to work with, they aren't sure which agency, you know, XYZ street falls within or what park space and who they need to be working with is that city of Chula Vista, is it the port of San Diego? Speaker 2: 06:24 Is it the city of San Diego? This map will ultimately point them into the direction so that they know who at their fingertips, they know who they, they would need to reach out to. And they could just click on a link and it pops up the film permitting information or the contact information for whomever that agency is now in the past productions. And they still can do this. They can still reach out to me directly, but if somebody isn't sure where, where their locations are, they can either reach out to me and I can point them in the direction, or they can use this map, which is available 24 seven. Speaker 3: 06:55 And is this a map that is still kind of in progress in the sense that are you adding locations? Can people add like their sites saying like, Oh yeah, I've got this great view here. You can come and use. So is it a kind of a work in progress still in that respect? Speaker 2: 07:10 It is. And it isn't. So we're constantly looking at based on feedback, we're getting from the public and through our own personal use, I'm looking at how we can finesse it, um, and how we can, how granular and detail we want to get. So I'll give you an example. Sometimes we get productions who want to film on a city of San Diego public sidewalk in a space that looks like it's public property, but at, in actuality, it, there are multiple different layers involved where let's say that particular space they're looking for is bridged by private property. Maybe it's MTS property, which is a state agency, and maybe it's also city of San Diego property. So what we're looking at moving forward is how do we, how granular and detailed can we get with this map so that it can show, if you drop a pin at this specific location, it will say, I'm working with I'm on city of San Diego sidewalks. I don't need to necessarily reach out to anybody else except for maybe do some good neighbor outreach to say, Hey, you know, private property owner, I am going to be filming, but it is going to be contained on city of San Diego property. And what do you see Speaker 3: 08:07 Moving forward in the next few months? I know that nothing is really easy to predict, but what kind of things are you currently focusing on? Speaker 2: 08:15 I mean, we're really looking at where the industry is going. So the intent in the next few months hopefully is that we would allow larger productions to come back online because the demand certainly seems to be there. Now, I will say something that's new for us in the midst of this pandemic that we weren't expecting is that as other filming destinations have ultimately gone offline for filming either because of quarantine or because California at the time was, was on a quarantined watch list where, um, they wouldn't allow crew that were traveling or casts that were traveling into their state to film, unless they were quarantine for two weeks at a time. So that ultimately leaves an opportunity for productions that want to film within the state of California. Because now if they can't go to say a Vancouver or someplace else, it means that productions are looking to stay closer to home. And there's an opportunity there to try to attract that to San Diego. And that's the intent at the end of the day is yes, we want productions to come back and we want them to be safe, but we also want the industry to come back and people to go back to work. All right. Well, I want to thank you very much for talking about filming here in San Diego. No, thank you for having me, Beth. I appreciate it. Speaker 4: 09:24 That was Beth Huck. Amando speaking with San Diego film offices, filming program manager, Brandy Shima. Bacaro.