Savannah Film Studios
Savannah Film Studios offers world-class production spaces and state-of-the-art technology to student filmmakers, digital media artists, actors, and designers in Georgia's booming entertainment industry.
History
The original 22,000-square-foot Savannah Film Studios building, a former meatpacking plant for the southeast region, opened in 2014. Today, it houses three soundstages, greenrooms, lighting grids, postproduction suites, a multipurpose recording booth that facilitates ADR and Foley recordings, screening rooms, and production offices for SCAD's film and television department.
Expansion and backlot
In the spring of 2021, SCAD announced a major expansion of the Savannah Film Studios site, a landmark 11-acre buildout transforming the surrounding parcels into the largest and most comprehensive university film studio complex in the nation. That fall, SCAD opened a leading-edge, 5,500-square-foot LED volume stage, which utilizes camera tracking and real-time rendering to create an immersive virtual mixed reality environment, visible live on set and shot directly on camera.
In the fall of 2023, the first phase of this expansive project culminated in the opening of the first section of Savannah Film Studios' Hollywood-style backlot. The first section, which totals more than 4,500 square feet of set space, resembles Savannah's historic district and includes 17 separate street façades, including homes, a café, a hardware store, and a lobby for a hotel and hospital.
The second phase opened in the fall of 2024, expanding the backlot to include New York City-inspired urban environments, such as alleys aged and distressed for gritty period pieces, as well as small-town movie sets like a 1960s-era gas station. This expansion also included a 17,000 sq. ft. production design building with a modern costume shop and a prop-making studio equipped with tools for woodcutting, welding, painting, and more.
The third and final phase of the backlot, scheduled for completion in 2026, will include two industry-standard soundstages and the full buildout of the backlot, consisting of a police station, a fully-constructed single-family home, a town square, and more.
LED volume stage
- 40 x 20 x 17-foot LED wall screen display with a 1.5mm pixel pitch
- Environments displayed on LED screen powered by Unreal Engine, the leading software platform originally used to create 3D real-time environments for video games
- Stage equipped with Stype RedSpy tracking device, one of the most precise camera-tracking systems in the industry; the device tracks the Red Komodo 6K camera, fitted with Zeiss lenses, using markers on the ceiling