Film Friendly and Music Friendly Designation for Texas Communities
The Texas Film Commission’s Film Friendly Program (FFTX) trains municipal leaders about the film production process and how to generate economic development by facilitating filming requests in their community. The program started in 2007 as a certification process, and a marketing program initiated and overseen by the Texas Film Commission. The Texas Film Commission is a component of the Governor’s Economic Development and Tourism Office. All of the necessary information for the certification, as well as a Texas map showing the certified cities can be found on the Texas Film Commission website. According to that officer, there are more than 160 film friendly certified communities ready to host film production, and they all participated in and completed a multi-step training and certification process.
In the Houston region, the cities of Galveston, Alvin, Mont Belvieu, Anahuac, The Woodlands, Pearland, League City, Seabrook, Conroe, Port Arthur are all designated film friendly communities.
A municipality can start the process by registering and attending the next workshop scheduled for October 5, 2022 in McAllen, Texas. There are three required steps necessary to become a certified film friendly city or community and they include (1) the workshop, (2) preparation, approval and adoption of film friendly guidelines that comport with the Texas Film Commission requirements, and (3) submit photographs of at least five filming locations in your community.
The overall purpose of the program is to stimulate economic growth by creating film-production employment. It is possible to create jobs for those with creative film skills, productions skills, and film production related jobs as well as the economic stimulus resulting from spending at local businesses. Upon certification, the Texas Governor’s office announces the designation and often posts an update on the Governor’s web page. This week, the City of Dumas became certified.
In addition, the Texas Music Office created in the late 1980’s is now a part of the office of the Texas Governor, and it has a program that leads to a certification as a Texas Music Friendly Community. According to the Governor’s office over thirty communities have become certified, and it too can generate entertainment or music related business. Here in the Houston area, the nearest certified communities are Victoria, Port Aransas, Bryan, Brenham, and Conroe. The Texas Music Office was created to stimulate new business development in Texas communities. The certification steps are set out on the Texas Governor’s website. Generally, to be designated a Music Friendly Community a Texas Music Office sponsored Music Friendly Community Workshop must be hosted, a liaison must be designated, registration with the Texas Music Office Texas Music Industry Directory, the demonstration of partnerships with the music related non-profit organizations, and collaboration with music education programs. The Texas Music Office also has a directory of musicians and many communities have created local musician registries to connect musicians to performing engagements.
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