Graffiti artist and Georgia film executive discuss taking risk, achieving momentum at forum

Closing with splashes of color Tuesday, the two-day Jim Blanchard Leadership Forum welcomed street artist Erik Wahl to the stage at the Columbus Convention and Trade Center.

The best-selling author and innovative thinker quickly went to work using brushes and his hands to paint an image of President Abraham Lincoln, the action set to the Coldplay song “Viva la Vida” and a video of people parachuting from rocks, diving into water and generally taking risks. That set up Wahl’s message that creativity for most humans tends to atrophy over time after their heyday of artwork is completed early in grade school.

“Pablo Picasso once said that every child is an artist. The challenge is how to remain an artist once we grow up,” he said, pointing out that people slowly over time are taught to become averse to risk out of fear of the unknown. Analytics and logic, which are certainly needed, tend to rule our minds far too often, said the best-selling author of the book, “Unthink.”

Wahl, whose presentation included video images of soldiers returning to family members in the U.S. after deployments as he painted the Statue of Liberty, stressed that new and different ideas, and creative ways of coming up with them, are needed among today’s leaders in both the public and private sectors.

“Creativity is really nothing more than seeing logic in the rest of the world around us, physically seeing it with our eyes, but yet thinking like no one has ever thought before,” the artist said in closing after painting his final image of physicist Albert Einstein. “That’s exactly what creativity and innovation and servant-centered leadership is going to look like going forward.”

The forum gathering of more than 1,100 people also heard from Lee Thomas, deputy commissioner of the Georgia Film, Music and Digital Entertainment Office. She started as a project manager with the Georgia Film and Videotape Office in 1996 and has been a major player in propelling the state to one of the top on-location film markets in the world.

That ride included the launch of the bare-bones office by Gov. Jimmy Carter in 1973 after the movie hit, “Deliverance,” was shot in northeast Georgia’s Rabun County, injecting $2 million into the state’s economy and helping a very poor area of the state at the time.

Then in the late 1990s, Georgia saw its movie business — and related companies servicing the industry — start slipping away as Canada began offering financial incentives for working there. That and the failure to land production of “The Ray Charles Story,” a film about the Georgia music legend, because of incentives suddenly appearing in Louisiana, was the final straw. The Georgia General Assembly set up an incentive package in 2004, which was improved with a film tax credit in 2008.

“You have to be one of those places where money is going to go the furthest, and that’s where Georgia is now. So now this is a completely incentive driven industry rather than a location (driven) industry,” said Thomas, who pointed out other cities across the state, including Columbus, have begun positioning themselves for a piece of the pie.

Locally, the Columbus Film Office assists with scouting sites for shooting, while Columbus State University is now training production assistants and crew for the industry. A professional sound stage also opened recently on Jamesson road in north Columbus, prompting proponents to set a goal of attracting 10 film productions within three years to the city.

Thomas said the overall success in the industry also includes Georgia’s geographic diversity, temperate climate for year-round shooting, and an international airport in Atlanta that has more than two dozen direct flights a day to Los Angeles.

“We have a lot of crew, we have infrastructure and we have a diverse shooting locations,” she said of the benefits. “In Georgia, you’ve got your mountains, your coastline, your small towns, your big cities. You can pretty much shoot anything you need to here in Georgia.”

This is the 13th year for the Jim Blanchard Leadership Forum, which was launched in 2006 by its namesake, the retired chairman and chief executive officer of Columbus-based banking company Synovus Financial Corp. The event is organized and presented by CSU’s Leadership Institute.

While Apple co-founder Steve “The Woz” Wozniak was the featured speaker Monday night for this year’s event, there have been plenty of major names on the Trade Center stage through the years because of the forum, names that may have not ever set foot in Columbus otherwise.

Those speakers include U.S. Senators Zell Miller and Sam Nunn, Chick-fil-A’s Dan Cathy, Secretary of States Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush, billionaire businessman Mark Cuban, Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, Pro Football Hall of Famer Peyton Manning and actress Octavia Spencer.

Next year’s dates for the event are Aug. 26-27. While the “Art of Leadership” was the theme this year, in 2019 it will be the “Science of Leadership,” organizers said Tuesday.

This story was originally published August 28, 2018 at 6:30 PM.