Where Was It Shot - cataloging filming locations

Like most of you here, I have been a big fan of Tamil cinema all my life and one of the things that has always captured my attention about our movies is the filming locations that have been used in our movies. Frequently I would find myself googling for the name of a location that was used in some song or scene of a movie that I had just finished watching. So, naturally my thought veered towards coming up with a web site for the same. When (I & my friend Amar) we looked around to see if any such sites that already existed, we found none. There were a few sites that were dedicated to documenting the filming locations used in Hollywood movies (even they have not been well maintained) but absolutely none for those used in Indian movies in general and Tamil movies in particular.

So, this was the idea behind the site and thus was born www.wherewasitshot.com.

The problem here though is the sheer magnitude of information that we are looking at here. Hundreds and hundreds of movies released over the decades and thousands & thousands of locations that have been used in those movies. And here we are, just a couple of guys, attempting to catalog them in a site. That is where we are expecting co-operation of like minded movie buffs here.

We have launched the site with around 50 locations and we plan to keep adding new 1-2 locations every week. But like we said, it is just impossible for us to find & publish all those filming locations that have ever been used in our movies. That is the reason we are considering this whole effort as one big social media project that involves contribution from everybody around. And towards that end, we have also created a forum as part of the site.

We welcome everyone here to take a look at the site and if you like what you see, please contribute (in the form of comments, suggestions, pointing out inaccurate information, etc) and introduce the site to your friends as well.

Let me sign off by reproducing the contents of the ‘About Us’ page of our site:

Wait a second. That scene in the song that just played on TV. Where did they shoot it?

Hasn’t that question crossed our minds? Haven’t we all at some point of time thought ‘How cool it would be to have a web site dedicated to documenting locations where movies are shot?’? We heard you. This web site is our answer to all your calls to put together a comprehensive collection of movie locations on the internet. Having spent so much time on blogs, discussion forums, Orkut community forums, we realized that the movie buff in every one of us has always been curious about the locations where the movies we love, were shot. We have done the job for you, as we scoured through the bottomless abyss called the internet and have come up with this collection of Indian movie locations.

As you can see, this is strictly a Work In Progress site, which means only 1 thing – valuable inputs from users & visitors like you. We are considering this as a huge social media collaboration project. So, if you know of any movie shooting spot location that you don’t find it here or you notice an error in our records, shoot us an email – wherewasitshot@gmail.com.

The locations have been categorized based on languages (currently, only Tamil, Hindi & Telugu), geography (North America, Europe, India) and people (your favorite actors, directors). You can either browse through the entries or search for the entries with a query.

Don’t forget to check back, as we are constantly adding more entries to our collection of movie locations.

Looking forward to your enthusiastic participation and response to our humble effort!