Carter
Summerhill
Year
2020
Scope
Shot on location in historic Summerhill
Scope
Full-service production and post-production for a neighborhood story film on Carter’s redevelopment of Summerhill.
Promotional documentary film
The Client
Who They Are
Carter is the development group behind the reinvention of Summerhill, the oldest neighborhood in Atlanta, and Summerhill asks a lot of anyone who takes it on. The site runs 83 acres across the old Turner Field footprint, and it arrived with sixty years of history attached, most of it hard, and a community that had watched plans come and go without ever being asked what they wanted.
Carter approached Summerhill as a partnership. Working alongside Georgia State University, K. King & Co., and Healey Weatherholtz Properties, they built the plan around the neighborhood and brought residents and elected officials into the room early. They kept it flexible, kept it market-driven, and kept the community at the center of it. More than a billion dollars of investment is built or planned in and around the neighborhood: a grocery store, shops, cafes, restaurants, housing, and an academic and athletic anchor, all aimed at making Summerhill a place where people live and businesses stay for good.
The Brief
They Asked...
Carter came to us with a story about partnership, and the partnership was the hard part to earn. For decades, officials and corporate interests had undervalued Summerhill and pressed relationships onto it from the outside. Any film about a developer moving in risked reading as one more version of that. The job was to show what the neighborhood had rarely been given: a real seat at the table. We had to honor the history, name what was lost, and make clear that this time the community helped shape the plan, so the film could earn the trust of people who had every reason to withhold it.
our process
How We Did It
01 - Pre-Production
Concept, Script & Planning
Concept and script work centered on the film’s voiceover, which we wrote. The narration had to carry the neighborhood’s history and then hand off cleanly to the residents and community voices telling the story in their own words, so we built the VO to move with the interviews and read as one continuous voice.
The rest of pre-production came together in close partnership with the client. We developed the concept alongside Carter, shaping what the film needed to say and who needed to say it. From there we assembled the crew and built the production timeline, so everything was in place before the first day on location.
02 - Production
On Set & On Location
We shot the entire film in Summerhill, on the ground the story is about. For a film built on trust and history, being there was the point. We set up multicam interviews across the neighborhood and sat down with the people who carry its story: longtime residents who remember what Summerhill was, community voices watching it change, and the Carter team steering the work.
Alongside the individual interviews, we ran a roundtable that brought several of those voices into one conversation. Multicam coverage kept us in the moment and let us catch the exchanges between people, the looks and reactions a single camera would miss. Filming on location put the neighborhood in frame with them, so the streets, the new construction, and the faces all lived in the same film.
03 - Post-Production
Edit, Color & Deliver
In post-production, the job was to weave the pieces into one honest arc: the history, the hard decades, and the turn toward something new. We recorded the voiceover and cut it against the interview soundbites, so the film moves between a narrator’s perspective and the people who lived it. The edit had to give the history its weight before it earned the optimism at the end.
From there we built the finish. We designed the sound to hold the emotional shifts, added motion graphics to support the story, and graded the whole film for a consistent, cinematic look. The result is a documentary that honors a neighborhood’s whole history and still lands on hope.
The Result
We Delivered…
The film had one job: make clear the partnership at the heart of Summerhill’s comeback, with the community’s interest up front. It had to convey the reason it mattered and the way it happened, a plan shaped with the neighborhood and built on what the community wanted. It had to carry the weight of sixty years of history and still land on optimism, the kind that comes when rebuilding a community becomes a win for everyone with a stake in it.