Kentucky Main Street Program | Tourism Video Production Kentucky

Visitors come to Kentucky for horses and bourbon — but its Main Streets are where they find the rest of the story. We produced this film for the Kentucky Main Street program, the first statewide Main Street program in the country. Established in 1979, it uses the Main Street Approach to drive economic development through historic preservation, and over 45 years it has helped revitalize more than 100 historic downtowns across the Commonwealth — communities like Bardstown, Covington, La Grange, Louisville, Maysville, Shelbyville, Paducah, Pikeville, Beattyville, Campbellsville, Carrollton, Cynthiana, Grayson, Guthrie, London, Middlesboro, Morehead, Murray, Perryville, Pineville, Salyersville, Scottsville, Springfield, Taylorsville, Tri-Cities, and Williamsburg.

This was a true statewide production. We shot it over six months as a split fall-and-spring shoot to catch Kentucky across seasons, filming on location in four of the cities and drawing the rest from archives. The finished film gives all sixteen featured Main Street communities equal visual weight, capturing the program from every angle: state leadership, local directors, civic officials, and the small-business owners whose storefronts tell the story best.

Production Challenge

The hard part lived in the edit. Featuring sixteen different cities in one film — and giving each enough screen time that no community feels like an afterthought — is a genuine balancing act. We pulled it off by weaving three sources into one cohesive statewide story: the footage we shot on location, evergreen video from the library, and library photography we'd captured with local actors in each market. Stitched together, it reads as one Kentucky, not sixteen separate towns.

About This Project
Client: Kentucky Main Street program (via Miles Partnership)
Type: Tourism & Economic Development Film
Location: Statewide Kentucky — Main Street communities across the Commonwealth
Services: Multi-location field production (four cities), archival and evergreen footage integration, photography with local talent, interviews, downtown b-roll, editing

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John Flower Productions has produced tourism and destination video across Kentucky since 2007. Ready to talk about your next project? Contact us.

Video Transcript:

Visitors may come to Kentucky for horses and bourbon, but they discover that there's so much more. They discover that there's an authentic Kentucky experience waiting for them on our Kentucky Main Streets. Our Main Streets are the heart and soul of our communities.

The Kentucky Main Street program began in 1979 to help communities preserve and revitalize historic downtown commercial districts. Through those efforts, economic commercial district growth occurred, and it established the foundation for future vitality, opening doors for other opportunities. Thanks to the vision and dedication of our program's founders and directors across the state, Kentucky Main Streets are vibrant hubs of activity, welcoming residents and visitors alike with their unique architecture, locally owned businesses, and cultural experiences. We invite you to visit a Kentucky Main Street community.

When you go into a vibrant Main Street community on a Saturday afternoon, and there are people on the sidewalks and people in the restaurants and mingling in and out of shops, it gives you that special feeling, and it makes it a place where people want to live, to invest, and to really grow their families. People are looking for unique places to live. They're looking for communities that have a sense of community, and that's what Main Street's all about.

We had the first statewide Main Street program in the country, so for the last 45 years, we've been providing services to communities across the Commonwealth. We've had well over 100 communities over those years participate and benefit from the program. A Kentucky Main Street is a community that's made a commitment to revitalization of their historic downtown or commercial district. They make a commitment to follow a four-point approach that's established by Main Street America.

The Main Street four-point approach is a philosophy that downtown and neighborhood commercial districts utilize to revitalize and create more vibrant downtowns. We do this through the organization committee — that's the committee that's really going to help with partnerships and funding. Design is about the built infrastructure, about creating that vital, vibrant sidewalk. Economic vitality is about supporting the businesses that have already invested in your downtown while creating ways to attract new entrepreneurs — the businesses you want to incentivize to help build a stronger economic engine. And the last one is promotions — events, programming, highlighting why your downtown or commercial district is the heart of your community.

The structure of it has been the best part — the organization, the structure, the fact that it has a program and plan and overall support from the state. We had a whole lot of work we were doing in the past, years of community development with all these disparate groups, and once we decided to go the route of Main Street, it seemed to pull everybody together in the right direction.