Kentucky wants to attract even bigger film projects to the state Senate.

Bill 324 builds upon last year's Film credit Bill, which created the Kentucky Film Office and a $75 million tax credit expansion to attract more productions to Kentucky.

Our Mackenzie Spink brings us an update on the program's success from the new executive director of the Kentucky Film Office.

Mike Pfister is a Kentucky native with 15 years of experience in the Los Angeles and New York film industries.

Now she's back home as the new head of the Kentucky Film Office, and she says the industry is taking notice of the state's film landscape.

Kentucky has built a lot of momentum in this industry, and we are in the spotlight right now.

When I was out at the Sundance Film Festival.

Kentucky was brought up without anyone knowing that I was a part of this program, and it was really in the eye of everyone in the industry as a place to look to work.

Part of Senate Bill 324 is raising the minimum that a production has to spend before it can qualify for the tax incentives in Kentucky.

Pfister says this will attract larger projects to the state and therefore more opportunities for Kentuckians.

This will.

Make sure that we are safeguarding the incentive cap for projects that will be larger and bigger impact for the state, so they'll hire larger crews, they will work longer days, and we will have, less of the low impact one day shoots kind of falling on the table.

And really, these minimums are on par with nationally.

So it keeps us competitive regardless.

And what we're hoping to grow Kentucky's industry to be more in the 5 to $30 million range.

So those will already meet all of those minimum.

Bill's sponsor, Senate President Robert Stivers, says last year's Senate bill one set up the right framework for film tax credits.

But he quickly learned that it needed to be amended.

What this does is it puts some things in place that should have been in place, shortly after last year's session.

I spent two days meeting with Paramount, Amazon, MGM, Disney, in LA.

We met and it was like we were just just a hair short of getting a $30 million feature film here in the rural parts of the state.

That's what educated me on the need, because we didn't have certain parts of this per diem listed in there, because it was going to have to be out-of-state talent, and that couldn't be considered for the credit portion of our tax credits.

Senate Bill 324 also expands the tax credit program to include music videos, commercials, and video games as qualifying productions.

We wanted to make sure for the purpose of just not having some of the things related to the movie industry that we include commercials, gaming, music, all these different other areas, so the talent doesn't have to go from state to state.

They can stay here and create the the environment and ecosystem that is conducive with all the talent ranges.

Senate Bill 324 passed unanimously and will head next to the Senate floor.

The Senate Economic Development and Tourism Committee also passed Senate Bill 249, which would allow federal Pell Grants to be used for qualifying workforce programs as well as higher education opportunities for Kentucky.

Edition.

I'm McKenzie.

Spink.