As a bicoastal, full-service production company, SunnyBoy Entertainment, with offices in Pasadena and Atlanta, has had its hands in many pots, ranging from motion design and post-work to EPKs and social video. And it was while producing behind-the-scenes and social content for big Hollywood films such as Supergirl, F1 and Project Hail Mary that the seed of further expansion into docs and unscripted was first planted.

“I was embedded on those sets, we were there pretty much almost every day here in Atlanta doing that, so we had enough material to turn these [projects] into documentaries,” SunnyBoy co-owner Harold Hayes Jr. tells Realscreen. “And so the format of documentaries became extremely exciting to me.”

The Hollywood labor disputes of 2023 also prompted Hayes (pictured left) and team to look at other genres. After all, if nobody is producing movies, then nobody is producing behind-the-scenes material either.

It was after meeting executive Micheal Smith, station manager and assistant VP at Atlanta’s Peachtree Television — now locally owned by Gray Media — that SunnyBoy’s first proper documentary project, the docuseries Welcome to the A: 50 Years of Hip Hop in Atlanta, came about. The series premiered on Peacock in 2023 to mark Black History Month and continues to stream on Tubi and Apple TV.

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