My Dream Road Trip and App to Make it Possible

I've always thought how great it would be to mash up the IMDB film location page with Google Maps. About a year ago, I researched locations to my favorite movies and created my dream road-trip via Google Maps, plus tagged where I would visit my friends  Have a look below, I have plotted to visit the backdrops for many a road-movie or seminal film for me (it's a work in progress) ranging from Into the Wild to True Romance.

                                     View Lisa US Road Trip in a larger map

The point is, I only ever used IMDB to research locations and some other random sites, then I would tag the locations on my map. It was a fairly laborious process. Then I found this site today: Filmaps. It's a Film & Tv location Wiki using Google Maps, people are posting up their own tags to filming locations. You can search by film/TV series, check out the Goonies breakdown, or Into the Wild. It is pretty amazing. The only negative thing about the site, is it still doesn't get around the problem of being able to help you map out your own personal trip or plan a schedule (it doesn't let you extract the information, all the maps are locked).

Film & TV Location Tourism on the Rise

After watching surf movie Blue Crush, I went off to Oahu's North Shore (I should really post about my surf-girl culture immersion for a month there, surreal) to explore and live in the film's beautiful setting. As Filmaps' puts it:

'Sometimes the charm of the places where the films have been filmed wakes up you adventure soul and you would like to discover even visit the exactly place where the scene is taking place'.

I think there could be a market for an online service such as this, the Telegraph writes about the surge in visits to British TV locations last year.

Iconic Sights App Idea

I want to develop an online service in which people can entirely self-plan an iconic sights trip. This service is about really personalizing it; creating one seamless visit and saves you researching and flicking between a thousand screens all the info. Here's how the App would work:

• Get given a blank map of the country or area you want to visit
• Tick the iconic/film/tv-sets/books/events/areas you like to visit by country - a plot would be worked out for you by Google Directions/Mapquest. It can go from big road-trips to a day-out in London.
• A complete road-trip is produced for you, including ideas for lodging, costs, suggested activities, movie/book/music fun facts- just basically make it an amazing foolproof schedule and very easy to book stuff.

You are just integrating google-maps+iconic sights+tourist operator service= How brilliant would that be?

Random

The one thing with funny thing with google maps earlier, is I typed in Thelma and Louise, and I found this. Look closely, yes they live on as Louise Drive and Thelma Avenue in Ohio....

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