New Atlanta area movie studio ‘Electric Owl’ opens in DeKalb

Steve Gehlbach
·2 min read

The next movie studio to call the Atlanta area home has opened in DeKalb County.

Channel 2′s Steve Gehlbach got an inside look at what’s being called the “greenest studio on Earth,” Electric Owl Studios.

The opening of the new studio adds to the multibillion-dollar television and film production industry in Georgia.

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DeKalb County and state officials came together with businesses and industry leaders at the new Electric Owl Studios for the grand opening and ribbon cutting Thursday.

Even with Georgia and the Atlanta metro area a major hub for productions on TV and film, Electric Owl’s co-founders saw a need for a smaller space that could cater to every need, while also being large enough for a Marvel movie, show, or to her tent-pole type of major motion picture.

Building a space “where one giant movie can come here and we can really take care of them and focus on them gives us an advantage as well,” studio co-founder Dan Rosenfelt told Channel 2 Action News.

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In addition to having a more focused touch for their clients, Electric Owl is also sustainable.

Co-founder Michael Hahn told Channel 2 Action News that environmental priorities played a role in the studio’s architecture and design.

“That’s from the construction process all the way through operations,” Hahn said. “So we’re very proud of that.”

Electric Owl Studios was built to be a LEED-certified facility, meaning it has green and environment-centric utilities like LED lighting, reclaims rainwater, and has “massive solar panels” on the roofs of the stages.

The studio hopes to use “green” as a way to set themselves apart.

Georgia officials said the new film studio was a positive for the state.

“This is a great fit,” Lee Thomas, deputy commissioner of the Georgia Film and Entertainment Office, said.

While some film production had stopped amid the writers’ strike, and the more recent Hollywood Actor’s Guild Strike that followed, Georgia hopes to capitalize in the coming months once a deal is done and work resumes.

“We’re getting calls, people are gearing up, and hopefully like when we came out of the pandemic, [we can] be on fire immediately,” Thomas told Gehlbach.

“We’re talking to five different feature films right now,” Rosenfelt told Channel 2 Action News. “TV will come along as writers start up again.”

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Electric Owl joins the much larger “Shadowbox,” formerly called Blackhall in South DeKalb, and “Assembly,” set to open by the end of the summer at the former General Electric plant site in Doraville.

The former GE site is expected to be a million square feet, or about three times larger than Electric Owl.

It shows there’s still demand and that film is still a growing industry in the Atlanta area.

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