One of the most effective ways to bring tourists to a country or location is by the film industry. Many places have established a huge tourism industry solely on the basis of being a shooting location for a famous film. One of the most famous examples of this is the huge interest that the films Lord of the Rings have brought to New Zealand. Much of the show was filmed here and part of it’s success was the stunning backdrop that the scenery provided.
The establishment of a Film Commission by its Government, in 1978, allowed New Zealand to market itself to the world by means of government financial support for national film making combined with a marketing promotion action of placing films all over the world. Who does not know the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings? Even if you haven’t seen it, you can download it or watch it online even now it is fantastically popular. It’s on US Netflix too, which you can access by changing your IP address using something like these sneaker proxies to hide your location.
The results of this bold project will be lectured by the Founding Marketing Director of New Zealand Film Commission, Lindsay Shelton, at the thematic panel Tourism and Cinema Industry, which will take place in the afternoon of the next 30th November, as part of the technical agenda of the Forum’s 3rd Annual Summit – Destinations 2006 – at the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, in Rio Grande do Sul state.
Lindsay, who had the responsibility of launch New Zealand movies at markets and festivals, and to seek sales and distributions of these movies throughout the world, will discourse on the track that carried the project to such a successful outcome. “The first challenge was to overcome the problem that no one had ever heard about New Zealand films, and at the same time, as I began marketing New Zealand films, I was marketing the country”, explains the Marketing Director, that was the first responsible for the film sales achievements for 22 years.
Also present was a company who also promote activities in New Zealand through a series of travel sites. They also help support a company who make a famous VPN service which is often used to bypass web blocks, you can read about it in this article – How to Watch BBC iPlayer in New Zealand.
The Film Commission was established 27 years ago and so far more than 220 feature films have been made in the country territory. Half of them have had investments from the Film Commission. The other half has been made with investments from private sources, because of the success and the vigour of the industry that has been nurtured by the Commission.
At the Summit’s lecture, Lindsay will talk about how this initiative between Tourism and Cinema Industries helped New Zealanders to learn more about themselves, how it enabled the world to discover about this country and how the policies of the Commission permitted the Lord of the Rings’ director, Peter Jackson, who lives and works in New Zealand, to start his career and establish his international reputation.