ArtsATL — In 2011, British storyteller-turned-Atlanta-resident Paul Jenkins spotted untapped creative potential. Why, he wondered, wasn’t the local creative filmmaking ecosystem seizing the excellent opportunity right under its nose? That opportunity was intellectual property (IP) — locally conceived and crafted.

“I was on a panel at Georgia State University sitting in an auditorium with a lot of people that are relatively influential — three from Los Angeles and three from the Atlanta area,” Jenkins recalls.

The discussion topic: whether or not Georgia could become a place that generates IP and makes films actually conceived here.

From his early days creating and developing comics to his later work on mega-successful cross-media franchises like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (a great example of transmedia spanning comic books, cartoon TV series, feature films and video games), Wolverine: Origins, Hellblazer, Spider-Man and six platinum-selling video games, Jenkins saw it crystal clear.

“I’m an immigrant to this country and to this state, [and] I was the only person on the panel that said, ‘Of course you can do it in Georgia.’ I’ve [nearly] done my entire career outside of Los Angeles, aside from two time periods,” the veteran says.

“So we were having all these young people educated [in Georgia], and then they’d go to Los Angeles and stand in line behind 3,000 other people just like them, hoping to get a job in the entertainment business, when we could have done it here in Georgia.”

From the panel discussion where Jenkins shared his insights — looking both from the outside in and back out again as an Atlanta resident — he was then approached by Gov. Nathan Deal and asked to chair an advisory committee on the topic of IP creation in Georgia.

Later, Jenkins says he shared the same beliefs in Georgia IP from his post on an advisory committee at Trilith Studios in Fayetteville, Georgia. As Jenkins says, his advisement was to bet on IP — and invest in it locally. [MORE]