As part of efforts to promote the county’s Camera Ready status, the Paulding Chamber of Commerce recently named Karen Burnsed as county film ambassador.

In this capacity, she will work with Georgia’s Film, Music and Digital Entertainment Office and with Kevin Kirby, the Camera Ready Liaison from the Chamber, to identify and promote possible filming locations, in addition to being another available resource for potential film makers.

“Paulding County is rich in landscape and potential film locations. From the Silver Comet Trail, to Civil War battlefields, to our historic theatre and downtown areas, we have a lot to offer location scouts,” Burnsed said.

“My goal is to promote our community as much as possible. In order to do that, I need help from all Chamber members and other local residents who have a location that they believe would be a possible location for filming. Whether it is simply an idea, or whether they own a particular site and are willing to allow its use, input from our community is essential.”

The Paulding County Chamber of Commerce has worked diligently to have Paulding County recognized as a “Camera Ready Community” within the state of Georgia. This designation encourages film and video location scouts to seriously consider our community as a place to film their projects. Potential filmmakers know that by working with a Camera Ready Community, they will have access to local expertise and support during every aspect of production from location scouting to traffic control, catering and lodging.

“This is a tremendous achievement for our community,” said Carolyn Wright, Chamber president. “Now that we have earned the Camera Ready Community designation, we need to work to actively promote Paulding County and showcase what we have available — including locations, talent, and our wonderful Chamber members, like hotels and caterers, that provide services to film companies while they are in our community.”

Some location ideas include lakes, rivers, quarries, waterfalls, fields of crops or orchards, period mansions, interesting residential homes, farms, barns, old water wheels and interesting landscapes.

The number of movie and television projects within Georgia has grown tremendously in the last several years. In 2011 alone, more than $689 million were injected into the state’s economy from Hollywood studios, production companies and independent producers. With Georgia being aggressive in giving production tax incentives to film companies, this number is expected to increase.

“We have to position ourselves to take advantage of this growing economic channel,” Burnsed said. “Our first step is to put together an extensive portfolio of locations available within Paulding County.”

Location specialists have access to the state’s database to match potential locations with their project’s requirements.

Those with potential locations for a movie or video project, can let Burnsed know so that it can be included in the Paulding County database.

Submit a brief description of the property and a photograph in jpeg format to camerareadypaulding@gmail.com. If possible, photographs should be 144-150 dpi , file size between 200KB and 1 MB, and have a resolution of 1280 X 1024.