Inside the Above & Beyond FAM Tour: How Discover Dunwoody Turned an Event Into an Invitation

When Discover Dunwoody signed on as a presenting partner of the inaugural Indie Spotlight alongside Universal Production Services, the organization did not stop at the sponsorship. It built a second event around the first.

Over September 23 and 24, Discover Dunwoody hosted the Above & Beyond FAM Tour — a two-day familiarization program for a dozen invited guests, among them producers, directors, location and travel managers, and creative executives with near-term projects. Collectively, their credits represent more than $100 million in production spend. Georgia Entertainment and Georgia Insider helped facilitate the program alongside Pivotal Events & Production Management.

Familiarization tours are standard practice in destination marketing, most often aimed at meeting planners and leisure travel writers. Aiming one at working production executives is a different proposition, and it reflects a specific understanding: production travel is its own category of business.

Crews book long stays. Location scouts arrive before anyone else and come back with departments in tow. Decisions about where a production sits are made by people weighing soundstage access against hotel inventory, drive times and whether a crew has somewhere to eat at eleven at night.

That is the case Discover Dunwoody set out to make in person.

Day one: behind the gates

Guests arrived at the Crown Plaza at Ravina in the afternoon, with rooms covered by Discover Dunwoody, and gathered for a welcome reception before departing together for Assembly Studios. There the group received behind-the-gates access to the campus and The Jewel Box around the evening program.

Indie Spotlight itself filled the room, with a standby list of requests the venue could not accommodate. The group joined a packed house for the producers' panel and the conversation that followed, putting the visiting executives directly alongside other independent filmmakers, studio leadership and partners.

The night continued back at the hotel with an after-event mixer where conversations ran late.

Day two: the Perimeter

The following morning opened with a power breakfast and remarks from Mark Galvin and Ray Ezelle of Discover Dunwoody, who framed what the group was about to see.

From there, the tour moved by trolley through the Perimeter, stopping at filming locations and buildings available for sets and shooting, and covering the hospitality landscape that supports a production once it lands — hotel inventory, the restaurant scene and the amenities a crew relies on during downtime. A recurring theme was proximity: the Perimeter's position relative to Assembly Studios and to active production across the surrounding counties.

The program wrapped by midday.

Why it matters

Georgia's competitive position has long been described in terms of tax credit and stage capacity. What this program tested is the layer underneath that — whether a community can show a producer, in two days and without a deck, that the practical questions have already been answered.

For the local businesses across Dunwoody and the Perimeter, the calculation is straightforward. Production activity in this sector fills hotel rooms for weeks at a time and puts crews into restaurants on a nightly basis. Getting a dozen decision-makers on the ground is how that pipeline starts.

Discover Dunwoody is a Cornerstone Partner of Georgia Insider.