I got tired of searching “where was this filmed” and landing on listicles, so I built the map instead. Search a title to see where it was shot, or search a place to see what was made there.
2,538 locations, 4,214 films and series. It is all built from Wikidata, one statement per pin, so every card links back to the source and you can check me.
It is honest about what it does not know, which no listicle is. 938 productions are recorded only at country level and the page says so. Gladiator is Malta and Morocco and nothing finer. Casablanca resolves to California. It also never claims which scene was shot where, because filming records do not carry that.
430 video games are on there too, placed by where they are set rather than shot, because a game is filmed nowhere.
India looks weirdly quiet.
I am working on finding a solution for India which works for both Indian audience and global audience
Do you have any preferred method for submitting missing data? Peter Pan & Wendy (2023), The Shipping News (2001), and The Grand Seduction (2013) were all filmed in Newfoundland.
Thanks for the suggetsions!
I have a system where I fetch feedback from comments or feedback from internet, where I sometimes do changes on the site and credit the user. https://thefilmmap.com/changelog/
The feedback gets verified before implemented on the site.
Some might not have wikidata yet, so that is an another problem where it needs to get that sortet out. I am also working on making parsing wikidata better and better.
Wikidata misses so much information for film locations sadly.
Did you look at parsing locations under the “Filming” sections of Wikipedia? Those get more detailed and accurate.
A good example is Transformers: The Last Knight. Wikidata has nothing, Wikipedia has like 15 locations, some down to the exact building
For data until 2017 you can still find the IMDb exports they used to publish.
Thanks for the hint! If it is still available I will check it out.
If you find that extracting data from IMDB is a pain, then check out TMDB (“The Movie Database”), they have a proper public API. I used it for a recent little project of mine called Two degrees of separation.
Thanks for the suggestion! I am going to go outside today before sitting down in the evening to continue on this project. I will see which databases will be applied for Filmmap.
It is still available: https://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/misc/movies/database/frozendata/
I will see if I can find a solution for it. It is started with wikidata because it is the easiest solution, but I will have to sooner parse because to get a more complete map. I hope to make the map more complete.
Yeah don’t get me wrong. I love the idea and project and that’s exactly why I’m suggesting more sources. I want to see it succeed. I totally get having to start somewhere though and coding the easiest start.
Yep, I lived in Brantford while they filmed Silent Hill and it’s not on the map
We were all really excited that they cleaned up the creepy fake people added to the abandoned storefronts to make downtown feel nicer.
That must be so cool to witness it! I will see if I can add it and you will be cited of course in the change log. Thanks for mentioning it:)
Ahhhh I don’t want to be cited, but it’ll be on IMDb or many articles I. The Brantford expositor
I see, I will not cite you then;)
It’s also on Wikipedia, which has a section with every city it was filmed in
That was probably fun for a week or two though I’d imagine. Leaning into a little horror fun. I’m a sucker for Halloween though so maybe just me
They had these colourful human silhouettes in all the closed businesses to make it feel lively. But the problem is when the whole street is just silhouettes it does not feel lively, it’s creepy and weird. And not in a Halloween way.
wikidata is much easier to query while querying natural language is hard
Although normally I’d agree, not so much here. Wikipedia headers are uniform most of the time so checking if a film has a filming section is easy. Then they handily wrap locations in a tag for their own processing purposes.
For example: [[Havana]]
That’s about as easy to parse as you can get.
they don’t just wrap locations in brackets, they wrap every single link in brackets so the software knows to make it a link. wikipedia’s big shtick is making articles have tons of link to each other so that is not easy to figure out which one is the location
not to mention examples like Terminator 1:
Filming for ‘‘The Terminator’’ was set to begin in early 1983 in [[Toronto]], but was halted when producer [[Dino De Laurentiis]] applied an option in Schwarzenegger’s contract that would make him unavailable
when they started filming, the set was moved to Los Angeles. following a link in that section to Rambo 2:
The film was shot between June and August 1984 [[Location shooting|on location]] in the state of [[Guerrero]], Mexico, and [[Thailand]].
clearly, the movie wasn’t shot in “Location shooting”, and we can’t just discard Thailand when placing all of the films dots on a map. similarly, Get Out begins with “[[Principal photography]] began on February 16, 2016.”
Yeah? That’s all exceedingly easy to the point of boring to handle. Grab everything between double brackets, test against the openstreetmaps data they’re using. If it isn’t a location, ignore. Done. As for your Thailand example, discarding regions that are too broad is exactly what they’re doing already based on a couple movies I looked at. I’d probably still save it for later as it’s a known trusted location I can compare against if I ever find another source of data.
What about the Terminator example? That is a location.
i’m not saying they should discard locations that are too broad (which in fact shouldn’t be linked); i’m saying when there’s multiple locations, all should be included.
Seems like Vancouver Canada should be larger given how many have been filmed there.
I imagine the data set also excludes most of Bollywood because India is not lit up on the map as if it were actually Las Vegas. Mumbai, for instance, has a grand total of seven titles listed, at least four of which leap out at me as being Western titles anyway.
Yes for the moment because Bollywood is not for the global audience, although there are movies which came from India that are globally recognizable. Even if I hate many parts of Hollywood, it is globally recognized. Hence, I start with Hollywood.
I working on finding a good solution for that, because there are many globally recognizable movies, series and video games that are currently missing on the map.
Perth is not real confirmed
Interesting but I know of a few missing locations for movies. For one it seems like Wikipedia is wrong a bit for Batman vs Superman. The gala or art scene was filmed in East Lansing MI but Wikipedia only says they were in Detroit.
Wikipedia isn’t wrong, just missing info. They definitely filmed in Detroit itself.
Yes and also I have not parsed it fully yet. I hope that I can fix it.
Thanks! Will see if I can fix it and will cite you to the change log if that is correct
No castles or palaces in North America? Rude.
Sorry I do not understand this comment
It’s me being sardonic. America doesn’t really have castles or palaces (outside of Disney theme parks), so of course there aren’t any marked on your map
Ah yes, the country/region of Arizona
This was for ‘Public Enemies’, by the way, which, aside from that blurb, says it was shot in just Chicago. A large part, if not most, was shot in various towns in Wisconsin.
So definitely needs some work…
Thanks! Will see if I can get them on the map as well.
I agree that the site needs a lot more work.
I am working on adding more and improving the map. Mostly it will be titles for a global audience. Will try to answer everyone soon:)
Neat project, but as mentioned there is a lot missing. Looked up a location where I filmed a movie, and over two dozen other projects were filmed and it is not listed.
My home town lists 1 movie, but in the last decade a dozen other projects have been filmed there.
Thanks! I know that there are many locations and movies, series and video games missing at the moment. I want to add more and more, but it is not easy even with the help of best Ai models. I like to use wiki due to its licenses and also because it has been added through quality editing in most cases.
Everything is filmed in Ontario or Georgia, Hollywood is just where executives live to sexually assault actors.
Yup! Holywood is where the crazy illegal stuff happens while everywhere else is the film scenes…
