By: Julia Bank

Efforts to revitalize Elkin have included large steps toward evaluating natural and historical attractions and reexamining our town's niche market appeal.

It seems like a very good idea to consider what Elkin has to offer within North Carolina, tourism and its local community. But I think we are being too narrow minded.

Yes, all of these pre-existing features are incredible on their own as tourist attractors, but when you start listing them all as a region you have other industries to consider.

One idea I haven't seen discussed yet, but think would be appropriate for our area, is to try and market our small town toward filmmakers. There are so many aspects of film production that Elkin could appeal to.

Key to film production is available resources--the most important of which are locations and labor. We have both.

We have foothills and mountains as backdrops. Small towns. Big towns. The Yadkin River flows through our town. We are near Kerr Scott Damn and Stone Mountain Park, which provide filmmakers with any lake, woodland and waterfall scenery you could hope for.

Even some of the less picturesque locations that might be considered eyesores to some are a natural resource for the guerilla filmmaker. I haven't met a filmmaker yet who didn't salivate at the prospect of abandoned farmhouses and derelict bridges. I've been on sets that spent thousands building and then distressing a barn to look just like one I could have found in Ronda.

At the recent Surry County Economic Development Partnership meeting Patrick Woodie, vice president of the N.C. Rural Economic Development Center mentioned our closed factories and textile industries in a positive light. He said that these empty spaces could be viewed as a resource for attracting new businesses looking to move into preexisting buildings already hardwired for industrial electric and water usage.

The same logic could be used for film production. Small films often utilize warehouses as sound stages to build interior sets that have scenes that require complex camera work or special effects that can't be filmed in real life.

I worked on a feature shot in South Carolina several years ago, that we shot the entire movie in an old empty factory. The owner would rent it to groups needing a large industrial space and had let a group of filmmakers produce several films there.

We built four or five 'scary' sets there that required movable walls for camera angles, an owner that wouldn't mind actors screaming through six or seven takes and fake blood on the walls. I spent two months in that factory, first building the sets then shooting the movie around them.

At the School of the Arts in Winston-Salem student films get shot all over the city. Part of the curriculum is learning how to talk people into letting you 'borrow' their home for a week, so you could shoot whatever scenes you didn't have the budget to decorate sets for in a house that already looks like a house.

Elkin has such a wide array of different houses and income levels that on the same street you could find the perfect house for a low-income family as your high-class character's abode.

This saves filmmakers gas, time and money, being able to wrap one location and move on to the next in the same day. Our accessibility to Highways I-77 and U.S. 421, both of which lead to airports under two hours away would also be a boon.

As for labor, we are rich in human talent in this area. Productions always need skilled laborers to bolster their crews, especially in the realms of production design.

The art department always needs extra hands with carpentry, painting and fabrication to build and decorate sets.

Specialists are needed to help assure that a certain time or setting is being accurately portrayed. And of course actors, extras and production assistants are always needed when a film comes to town. Once again, when looked at on a larger scale even Elkin's population has a lot to offer a visiting film production.

There are a lot of jewels nestled within this Tri-County Area, with Elkin smack-dab in the middle of it all. The initiative seems to be there to try and start marketing all of these resources as individual tourist and business attractions. But when you start to look at the whole area collectively, I believe there are further options available to consider when reinventing Elkin.