Kyle Carey is an Atlanta film industry professional. His specialty is in location scouting and location management, a field he’s served with his expertise for over 10 years. “Part of the beauty of it is that there really isn’t a typical day,” he said.
On the front end of a production, Carey invests his own creative thinking in choosing a perfect location for a scene, coordinating with the production design department and the director to identify locations that tell a story. Carey says it’s his favorite part of the process, and considers a location akin to “another character within the show.”
While Carey’s intimate knowledge of the Atlanta area (having been born and raised in the city) comes in handy, he also enjoys his job’s many opportunities to learn about new places. “It takes you to places that you never dreamed you’d get to go to,” he said. “It introduces you to people that you never thought that you’d get to meet.”
Carey also described one of the greater challenges of his job, which he identified as “trying to be that bridge between fantasy and reality.” It’s one thing to pick out a compelling location, but quite another to handle the many logistical concerns of preparing it for a shoot. Carey explained, “There’s a story that we are trying to capture on camera, and when doing that on location, there’s usually a pretty significant footprint involved, and we have to be able to control what is actually seen in frame, while simultaneously being mindful of the fact that we are guests in the area.”
Like many Atlanta film crew workers, Carey’s proud of his contributions to the wildly popular TV series “Stranger Things,” which he’s worked on for the past seven years. “So much time and effort is put into each and every season, and the people that I am fortunate enough to work alongside on that show have, in many ways, become some of my closest friends,” said Carey. “The response that we’ve seen to the show overall is a dream come true.”
