There are numerous websites on the internet that allow movie producers and filmmakers to find locations to shoot their films. As a matter of fact, every state in the country has a website selling locations. But these websites don’t mean anything to us mere mortals. The real question is, do websites exist where we can find out where these movies were shot? Yes, yes they do, and here are the top 3 websites that do the research for you so you don’t have to hop from IMDB to Wikipedia to Google Maps just to see where a movie was filmed.

FamousLocations is the most amazing movie location search engine on the internet. It provides plenty of information and has an enormous database. However, its most impressive feature is its versatile search function. For example, in addition to searching for movie titles, TV shows, actors, and directors, you can also search by cities, villages, ZIP codes, etc, and see what movies were filmed in those locations. It even provides a list of specific buildings where the films were shot in each city. Additionally, FamousLocations provides a lot of information about each film, and the reason for this is because users can add information on their own, just like Wikipedia. Furthermore, the locations themselves are pinpointed on Google Maps, allowing you to zoom in to the exact spot. And not only does it provide information about the location of the movie, but much like IMDB, it provides an actors list and a summary as well. Overall, not only is FamousLocations the most complete film location database on the internet, but it also provides the most amount of information and offers a large list of location spots for each film it covers. (It brings up 66 locations for The Godfather).

Movie-Locations.com - This website has the potential to become the biggest movie location database on the internet, and it could in a heartbeat if it decided to make all the film titles available for us. Why doesn’t you ask? Well, because otherwise there would be no point in buying the book which lists all of them, The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations (It’s the greatest source for movie locations outside the internet).

Therefore, as of now the website only lists about half of the movies available in the book. Now, Movie-Locations.com offers solid information about several scenes in each movie and provides fresh commentary and interesting facts about the shooting locations. And one thing it does better than FamousLocations is that it provides its own original photos of the locations as opposed to showing Google Map satellite images. Overall, Movie-Locations is a great online database and it will get even better when they finally release all the movie titles on the website. Oh, I didn’t tell you? Yeah, they recently announced that soon all the titles will be available online!

Movie Locations Guide – The most organized website of the bunch with the best interface. Unfortunately, it has a limited amount of movies to choose from, and it usually provides only 1-2 actual locations for each movie. However, it supplies a fairly useful description of the locations and allows users to pinpoint them on Google Maps. The most unique and interesting feature of Movie Locations Guide is the Request function. You can ask a location question or make a request, and once approved it will appear on the site along with a personal response. Movie Location Guide is slowly growing, so it has potential to become much better, but as of now it does not have too many choices.

Wait! But why not just use IMDB you say. Well no, IMDB only lists the locations. It provides no pictures, no maps, and no descriptions. So if you want to find out where a movie was shot, your best bet is to visit one of these sites.

-Sasha Lahijanian

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Alts, Reviews, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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