The West Michigan Film Office has been given a cash injection by state authorities to help promote regional filming. Michigan production tends to focus on Detroit in the east, with features like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice being among the current high-profile visitors.
Ben Stiller’s family comedy sequel Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb has promoted its London filming locations ahead of the movie’s December opening. The film follows Stiller’s night security guard and his adventures with museum exhibits that magically come to life after dark.
A group of leading Hollywood filmmakers have successfully convinced the major US studios to help ailing film stock manufacturer Eastman Kodak and keep the company in business. The studios will likely commit to purchasing film each year, despite the rise of digital movie-making.
New Zealand plans to boost film tourism with a special screening of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the final movie in the Hobbit trilogy. In addition to the screening, the 150 fans from around the world will also get a tour of some of the filming locations over the space of a week.
North Carolina has seen an increase in production spending for the first half of 2014, compared to the same period last year. Television dramas like Sleepy Hollow and Under the Dome have helped drive a filming boost, but the future of the state’s filming incentive remains uncertain.
Tony Armer has been appointed the new head of the St Petersburg-Clearwater Film Commission in western Florida. Armer founded the city’s annual Sunscreen Film Festival in 2005 and is also an accomplished filmmaker, film professor and business executive.
The US drama series Dig is to start filming first unit interior scenes in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the city given a profile boost by Breaking Bad. Much of the show’s first series has been shot in Jerusalem, but producers decided to relocate as violence escalated between Israel and Gaza.
Scotland is anticipating a film tourism boost as the launch date approaches for TV miniseries Outlander. Based on novels by Diana Gabaldon, the show filmed on location near Glasgow and tells a time-travelling story that flits between World War II and the mid-18th Century.