The more we have looked at film tourism the more we have become convinced that it should become work integral to screen agencies and filmcommissions. Doing it that way means additional work load is minimal but the benefits large.

What are the benefits?

The benefits can be enormous, particularly for non-commercial agencies. Creating a wider relationship with businesses outside of the creative sector has a lot of ‘political’ benefit. A wider range of businesses, and  more of them, understand the value of the service. Also, you can form better relationships with tourism oriented businesses and agencies who often also have significant influence.

Oh, and of course there is the economic impact which is easier to measure if you have relationships with the tourism sector.

We, at OpenBrolly, continue to develop new ways of delivering valuable information and services for film tourism as part of an integrated service.

Useful links:

Kent Film Office Movie Map

MovieSite demo Movie Map

The Independent article

The industry days on film tourism were agreed to be successful, sharing best practice and demonstrating the emerging technologies.

A number of conclusions were drawn, not least that solutions must reflect the visitors’ needs and that engagement of the tourist, through social media, was the next step in developing a film tourism product. The importance of film goers understanding where a film was shot was illustrated – perhaps a condition of local funding and assistance could be prominence of the location in the credits.

OpenBrolly provided a review of the changes in technology: we are in the middle of a major transition to mobile devices, geographic and context described information. In addition, social media, has to be considered in any tourism product design and marketing strategy. New technologies, such as video delivery, QR codes and augmented reality offer exciting ways of delivering content but are not without their real-world constraints – such as mobile operator data caps and slow speeds in some areas.

OpenBrolly will continue to develop examples of film tourism solutions and David Sim is speaking again at Screentourism 11 – Friday 18th March 2011, The Princess Anne Theatre, BAFTA, London W1

The festival runs from 18th to 25th February. The symposium is part of The International Love Film Festival of Mons, created under Elio Di Rupo’s initiative in 1984, and is aimed at uniting so-called intellectual cinema with more popular cinema.

Geoff Wilcock will be speaking about new projects, new technologies and new perspectives. David Sim will lead a workshop covering new technologies that can be used in cinetourism / screen tourism / film tourism, including social media.

http://www.fifa-mons.be/

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.