Your Next Commercial.

Let’s go through the obligatory locations “lookbook” first, because that’s where this conversation starts.

You need a coastline. Oregon has 363 miles of public coast. Every inch of it, from the sea stacks at Cannon Beach to the ancient sand dunes at Florence to the storm-battered headlands south of Brookings, is a State Park. No private beach access issues. No permit nightmares from a dozen competing jurisdictions. The whole coast. One continuous permitting jurisdiction.

You need mountains. From PDX Airport, you first fly over it and then you’re within an hour of Mount Hood, which has been filmed so many times it has its own entry in the Oregon Film Trail, and still looks like nothing else. And that’s true of our section of the Cascades: Crater Lake, The Three Sisters, Broken Top. And The Wallowas in Eastern Oregon, which look like what the Alps would look like if they had a permit office that actually made it easy on you.

You need urban texture. Portland has it. The Hawthorne Bridge, the Pearl District, the industrial neighborhoods of the Central Eastside, the Victorian streetscapes of the inner neighborhoods, the covered market in the Park Blocks. All of it within twenty minutes of each other on the kind of road grid that doesn’t make your production manager cry.

You need desert. The high desert east of the Cascades. Hart Mountain, the Painted Hills, the Alvord Desert. It literally looks like no other landscape in the United States at this price point. Ochre and rust and volcanic basalt and a sky that goes all the way to the end of things.

You need all of this within a two-hour radius of each other.

Oregon has that.

And, if you’re living in southern California, where else can you fly in, get a full day of locations, production and footage to die for, and then fly back home all in the same day?

Now let’s talk about the money, because as of July 1, 2026, the conversation has changed.

Commercial production now qualifies for both the Oregon Production Investment Fund and the Greenlight Oregon Labor Rebate program. Together, these programs offer up to a 26.2% cash rebate on commercial production work in Oregon; goods and services and labor, below and above the line.

Cash rebate. Not a tax credit. Not a certificate you take to a broker who gives you back 88 cents on the dollar four months later. A check, from the state of Oregon, into your production bank account, after an audit of verified Oregon spending.

Here’s how it works.

If your commercial production spends more than $1 million in Oregon (and for a large-scale commercial, it will) you need at least 50% Oregon residents as crew and at least three production days in the state. That qualifies you for the full OPIF program: 25% on qualifying goods and services from Oregon vendors, 20% on qualifying Oregon payroll. On top of that, the Greenlight program adds a 6.2% pass-back of the Oregon income tax withholding from your in-state payroll. Combined: 26.2% effective on labor.

If you’re shooting outside the Portland metro area - which, given everything in the location reel above, you very well might be - the Regional OPIF adds another 10% on your total rebate for productions spending 50% or more of their production days outside the city. A campaign shot at the coast or in Eastern Oregon or in Southern Oregon combines into something genuinely unusual: exceptional locations, experienced crew, and an incentive stack that can reach close to 30%.

No sales tax on any of it, because Oregon doesn’t have one. Every equipment rental, every purchase from a grip house, every vendor contract, none of it carries the 7% or 8% that would apply in most of the markets you’re comparing against.

Let’s talk about the crew, because this is where the conversation usually turns for the ADs and line producers in the room.

Oregon’s commercial crew base has been working locally for twenty years, shaped by television productions - Grimm, Portlandia, Shrill, Trinkets, Leverage - that ran long enough to train people properly and employed them consistently enough to keep them here. The result is a grip and electric and camera and art department and costume ecosystem that knows how to work at the level of large-scale production, knows each other, knows the vendors, and is not going to cost you the three days of re-shoots that come from hiring a crew that hasn’t worked together before.

On top of that, everything else you need is here. Cameras, lighting, sound, trucks, VFX and the best food and drink in the country. We’ve been doing this production thing for more than a century and, after a while, you get good at it!

World renown agency Wieden+Kennedy has been making the most celebrated commercial work in American advertising history from Portland since 1982. “Just Do It.” The Man Your Man Could Smell Like. Bo Knows. Dream Crazy. Colin Kaepernick. 23 Emmy nominations and 8 Emmy wins. The entire arc of Nike’s global identity, and a significant portion of the most culturally resonant commercial campaigns of the last four decades, was conceived and produced from a building in the Pearl District.

That matters not just as a point of civic pride but as a statement about the commercial crew ecosystem this city has been building around that work for forty years. The directors, cinematographers, editors, and production talent who have worked in and around W+K campaigns have built careers here. They live here. They work here. The commercial production infrastructure that grew up in the orbit of one of the world’s largest independent agencies, and the Nike campus twenty minutes away in Beaverton, and the Adidas North American headquarters across the river, and the brand production work that flows continuously from both, is your production infrastructure when you land in Oregon.

The commercial work and the film work share the same crew ecosystem, which means the person operating your camera next Tuesday may have last worked on a Nike global campaign shot in the Columbia River Gorge, and is bringing that experience, and that specific knowledge of how Oregon’s landscape performs on a professional monitor, to your shoot.

That cross-pollination is not available everywhere.

There is also the question of what it is like to actually make something here.

Oregon Film reviews budgets in standard industry software: Movie Magic and Showbiz. They will go through your numbers line by line and give you the most accurate rebate estimate available. They pick up the phone. They have been doing this since 2003 and they have seen essentially every production structure and budget scenario that commercial work generates. The process of getting from “we’re thinking about shooting in Oregon” to “we have a signed application and a clear timeline” to “we’re done and we can’t wait to come back” is not a bureaucratic exercise. It is a partnership.

The permit infrastructure is real. The location scout network is real. The Oregon Locations Database covers urban, coastal, agricultural, forest, desert, mountain, and everything between. The film office has relationships with state parks, federal lands, private landowners, and the county offices that control permitting across the most cinematically interesting parts of the state.

If you are reading this and you have a campaign in development - athletic, outdoor, automotive, lifestyle, fashion, food and beverage, technology, anything that benefits from locations that feel genuine rather than constructed - Oregon is the answer you have been looking for.

It has always had the locations.

It has always had the crew.

It has always had a film office that operates at the level of a working production partner rather than a government agency.

As of July 1, 2026, it has the incentive to match.

Cash back.

No broker.

No haircut.

Into your production bank account.

Start with the Commercial Production Intention Form at oregonfilm.org, or call us directly.

Let’s talk about your next commercial.

Contact: tim@oregonfilm.org · 971.254.4021