You can read about the launch and the circle conference here.

The Kent Film Office and Screen South hosted a reception to celebrate the premier of ‘The Calling’ starring Brenda Blethyn. Brenda congratulated Gabrielle Lindemann and her team at Kent in their work; we were please to hear her mention the MovieSite databases.

We, at Open Brolly, had the opportunity to discuss our model for a sustainable and quality Tourism product using our work with MovieSite and Social Media.

Open Brolly agreed a contract to provide software to the Abu Dhabi Film Commission yesterday at the Cannes Film Festival. Abu Dhabi is the capital city of the United Arab Emirates and is building a major film and TV production centre for the creative industries as an investment for when oil revenue declines. It is only one of two film commissions in the Middle East and as well as looking to attract Hollywood it is also looking towards the rapidly growing Bollywood market. It has one of the biggest presences of all the screen agencies from around the world in Cannes this year.

We discover all sorts of interesting things along the way. One of these is social media (see below) and have set up a company to deal with this at 4tm-services.com.

We have had several speaking engagements and are currently planning our Cannes presence. One of the key areas this spring will be to spell out that film tourism need not be difficult to implement. To plan and co-ordinate is a different matter

One area we have been mentioning to clients over the last year is that they need to think about mobile internet access to information. People want to do things as easily as possible and the uptake on using mobile phones for email and getting information is huge; how many Blackberries do you see on the bus and train? I am pleased to see we are in good company Sir Tim Webbers has recently said this is the way ahead. The good thing about the mobile web is that if you have planned your web presence and services well it should not be too difficult to add this service.

In 2009 we expect mobile offerings in our screen agency, tourism and social media offerings.

The Museo Nacional del Prado has created “Masterpieces” on Google Earth, enabling users of the application to zoom in to the Museum on a map. However, it goes a step further – you can enter the building and view high resolution images.

As Stephen points out, the potential for using Google Earth for film locations is huge: both for marketing and for film tourism. Some ideas:

- Take advantage of Google Earth’s ability to display photographs of locations on a map, and set up a tour of recommended locations for an enquiry. This could be the next generation of web brochure, available now.

- Add links to film trailers, film publicity stills and location shots, and allow users to fly across your region stopping when something is of interest.

- Create links from Google Earth back to your locations database.

MovieSite supports custom integration with Google Earth. Contact David Sim for further information.

The key areas we have sought to understand are there:

1. Film-induced tourism
2. Regional collaboration
3. Co-production
4. Demonstrating value
5. Marketing of agencies and offices.

By definition, film tourism is likely to be delivered through a portal and so I’ve been doing a lot of desktop research recently on tourism portals. It has led me to understand the value of Destination Management Organisations (DMOs). DMOs are essentially formed by tourism businesses in an area (sometimes with public sector support) whereas, all too often, a portal is setup from the top down.

It is impossible to stimulate the involvement and commitment of front-line tourism businesses from the top. The best approach is to give them the means to work towards a common goal. Even in the unlikely event a central portal raises world awareness it cannot sustain dealing with it. The market always wins in the long run; unless it makes sense for tourism businesses to get involved it is not sustainable from the centre. My example of how not to do it is www.visiteurope.com!

My message is borne of experience from when we first set up web sites and Intranets over thirteen years ago. You have to empower those involved to help create something worthwhile. Otherwise, it eventually runs out of steam.

Does anyone know of any web sites / portals in that category?

We have been working on developing a film tourism business model that will work for our clients and ourselves. Its slow progress working out the up and downs of options but we think we are getting there.

If any project is to be sustainable it must be of such a benefit to its target audience that the audience puts time or money into it. This is a clear warning to agencies not to believe they can do such a good job someone else will take it over when the money runs out. It has to make sense to tourism businesses from the start. This leaves two options:

1. Your film tourism idea is so unique that businesses will willing support it through cash or time, in which case why are you doing it?
2. A low cost , low resource way of leveraging film office and agency information in such a way as to not impose a burden but allow the tourism businesses do the work.

I underline my point. No matter how great a web site is it will fail if it does not have money or people to keep it that way. I believe it is possible to combine the information that film offices hold with the latest web technologies to be seen as an important partner but not having to do all the work.