One woman’s journey to build a film studio on Georgia’s coast

But the town is too beautiful, the land too plentiful and the Georgia film tax credit too generous not to. That’s what drew Pigmental Studios, an animation studio with a footprint in Washington, D.C., to the coastal Georgia town perhaps best known as the gateway to Cumberland Island, said the studios’ CEO and co-founder, Marina Martins.

“My motto is, ‘Come for the tax credit; stay for the experience,’” Martins said.

Pigmental will partner with developers to build everything else necessary to support a production, like temporary housing or an urgent care, and lean on nearby cities for their airports and film crews, Martins said.

“We’re not plugging into an existing ecosystem,” Martins said. “We’re creating an ecosystem.”

Creating an ecosystem from scratch while competing with established players in Georgia that are closer to Atlanta, all while weathering turbulence in a global entertainment industry, will present Pigmental with many challenges.

Pigmental wants to build a 115-acre media campus in St. Marys with more than 1 million square feet of production space. This square footage equals about one-fourth of the total production space inventory in Georgia and is roughly equivalent to the amount offered at Fayetteville’s Trilith Studios, the state’s largest studio complex.

The campus plan, designed by architecture firm Gensler, includes facilities to support both animation and live-action production, including 18 soundstages, creative offices, mill shops and other production support facilities. Short-term housing, on-site eateries and “contemplative wellness-oriented spaces” for crew members are also included. So are community-facing components, including a hotel, performance center, commercial space and an urgent care facility servicing both productions and residents of St. Marys.

This is the long-term plan, one Pigmental hopes to complete in phases over the next several years. If built, Pigmental could serve as a center of gravity for filming activity in coastal Georgia and northern Florida, where there are few soundstages and dedicated postproduction facilities.

But five years in the entertainment industry are like dog years — every changing of the season brings new technology, new talent, new ways of doing things. Within the last five years, streaming has usurped cable, artificial intelligence capabilities have advanced significantly and the pace at which studios have produced content has risen and fallen.

The market in which Pigmental will deliver its planned campus will likely look very different from the one of today.

Several headwinds are challenging the industry. For one, production has slowed as studios and streamers shift their focus back to profitability after years of spending on content, leaving many stages in Georgia empty. On the real estate construction side, interest rates are near 40-year highs, which makes all types of ground-up construction difficult to begin. The state is not lacking soundstage space, as developers have doubled the amount of square footage over the last five years.

But the project has the support of Camden County. Pigmental will build on the former site of the St. Marys Airport, which ceased operations in 2017. In 2021, Camden County received funding through the state to redevelop some of the property, which they used to put in water, sewer and information technology infrastructure along the runways and turn the taxiway into a road.

James Coughlin, executive director of the Camden County Joint Development Authority, figured the old airport might be attractive for the types of local businesses needing warehouse space, like a building supply company.

But when he initially toured with Martins, she said it was perfect.

“I don’t think any of us had thought that a film studio would work at that location,” Coughlin said.

Credit: Gary McCullough

Credit: Gary McCullough

What is Pigmental?

Founded more than a decade ago, Pigmental is a full-service animation studio with multiple arms. It develops its own content. It works with clients to arrange financing or secure distribution deals. It even has a book publishing division.

Many of the titles under Pigmental’s umbrella are still under development, including “Nashville Cats” and “Finn in the Forest.” Even the most high-profile project Pigmental has publicly announced, “Household Pests,” has been in development for at least a decade. It’s based on a story from Sergio Pablos, a co-creator of “Despicable Me,” and initially had a release date of January 2023. Most of Pigmental’s work with other clients isn’t showcased on their website, Martins said.

Producing an animated feature typically takes much longer than a live-action film. It’s extremely labor-intensive, requiring all types of artists and technicians to render concept art into a digital environment. Walt Disney Animation Studios says it takes an average of three to five years to create one of its animated features.

Pigmental is in production on the pilot of an animated children’s television series called “Here Comes Mavo” with Gallaudet University’s Motion Light Lab. Gallaudet primarily teaches students who are deaf or hard of hearing, and the animated series features a deaf lead character and 3D avatars using sign language. Pigmental and Gallaudet crowdfunded $50,000 late last year for the pilot.

So, if Pigmental is an animation studio, why does it need so much space?

“I don’t think a small studio that just services Pigmental’s needs can survive,” Martins said. “We can either go in and make this whole community, a viable full studio, or we can rent a building and do some Pigmental work in there. There’s no in-between.”

Pigmental wants to build enough space to accommodate both its own work and outside productions that would rent from the company. This reduces the risk of building the project, Martins said. Plus, the other components, like the retail or hotel, could mitigate reliance on a single source of income from just the film production side of the development, she said.

It was through Jim Jacoby, an Atlanta developer best known for Atlantic Station, that Pigmental landed in St. Marys. Jacoby is turning the 721-acre former Gilman Paper Mill — six miles west of Pigmental’s site — into an ecotourism destination with homes, a marina, retail, a hotel and vacation rentals. He wanted to incorporate a studio.

But Martins wanted to move faster than Jacoby’s timeline, and Jacoby had too much on his plate to commandeer the project, so he asked her to take it on independently.

And Pigmental is moving fast.

In May, the St. Marys City Council unanimously voted to rezone vacant parcels of land at the site of the now-shuttered county airport into a planned development district. That same month, an LLC associated with Pigmental paid $1.4 million in cash to acquire 66 acres, according to county property deeds. The company closed on its final piece of the full 115 acres this month, Martins said.

Martins said she is working with a couple of different funding partners for the project. She didn’t disclose them, though she says they are private equity funds. Martins said she “came in with support” for the construction financing.

There hasn’t been talk of using bond financing to fund part of the project so far. But Pigmental is located in a tax allocation district, and Martins said the project is eligible for New Markets Tax Credits, a federal tax incentive that provides credits to investors in projects promoting economic growth in low-income communities.

Pigmental hasn’t asked the county for anything, Coughlin said, other than for the land to be sold at below market value. The city agreed to this because it determined the benefits of the Pigmental building on the land — which would generate tax allocation district revenue, create jobs and support other businesses in the area — far outweighed the initial land value discount.

Credit: Gary McCullough

Credit: Gary McCullough

‘Impetus for going now’

The biggest risk in development is the lag time between concept and delivery, said Rick Porter, a land development and real estate brokerage expert and the director of Georgia Tech’s Master of Real Estate Development program.

“We are studying a market today with only the tea leaves to go by for three years,” Porter said.

Developers have put some projects on the back burner or killed them entirely because they couldn’t get them financed, even in entertainment. Earlier this year, a planned $1 billion film studio campus in rural southwest Fulton County did not move forward after its developer could not secure financing.

But before interest rates soared, Georgia experienced a surge in film studio development, going from 2 million square feet in 2020 to more than 4 million. Stages went up in Douglasville, Doraville and Athens. Six older buildings at the former Fort Gillem army post were rehabbed into stages and production space. Columbus added a 180,000-square-foot facility on an 80-acre campus.

“Stages are a great asset class, but they will saturate,” Martins said. “If we’re not doing it now, we may not be doing it at all. That was the impetus for going now.”

Some studios landed multiyear deals with content producers, and with those deals comes a consistent stream of rental income. NBCUniversal, for example, signed a 15-year lease to manage all of the studios and production facilities at Doraville’s Assembly Studios.

But the majority of studios are signing individual deals with productions. And now with a larger share of studio campuses fighting for a limited supply of projects, some are reporting lower-than-average occupancies, if they’re occupied at all. This makes building outside of an established hotbed for filming riskier than inside of one.

St. Marys has attracted film crews in the past. Its historic Riverview Hotel was featured in Warner Bros.’ 2019 film “Doctor Sleep.” Disney filmed parts of its live-action “Dumbo” in the city. Faith-based and independent films have shot in surrounding Camden County.

But Camden County’s lack of facilities, crew base and other resources often do not make it an immediate first choice for producers. Often, filmmakers will just outfit a stage or exterior space at a studio in Atlanta to a coastal setting. Producers on the upcoming Peacock series “Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist,” for example, filmed scenes set in Jekyll Island at BlueStar Studios in southwest Atlanta.

Pigmental wants to change that. Martins wants her project to be a campus where filmmakers can reconnect with the joy of filmmaking rather than dwelling on the “mind-numbing logistics” of the craft. In December, the company will launch a skills-focused training program for media-related jobs, allowing emerging crew and storytellers to gain practical skills and network with established professionals.

Martins has devoted much of her time and energy to the studio itself over the last year and a half. But she says Pigmental will be in preproduction on a slate of live-action films by the first quarter of 2025, a deviation from its typical wheelhouse.

“We looked at all the things we wished we had and tried to find a way to make it less painful and more enjoyable. And that was our approach,” Martins said.