Location Scout Resource: Tools + Utilities 2

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hoboken-njt-IMG_20190620_162157 © 2020 Copyright R. Richard Hobbs / nyc.locationscout.us

Location Scout Resource: Tools + Utilities 2

More tools and resources for location scouts and other production folks – continued from:

Location Scout Resource: Tools + Utilities

is a collection of various (mostly) electronic tools I know (because I have used…) or I think might be useful for a location scout, location manager or other production person. Could be a website (with an online “tool” (?), software, etc. Most are free, but if there is some cost involved, I’ll try to mention it.

Template for Recording Location Scout Data

Coherent Visual: Location Scouting Template – From the Coherent Visual Website, author of the book, Nuts and Bolts Filmmaking.

Location Scouting template

Page template that can be used to record and evaluate location sites for filming

In my Nuts and Bolts Filmmaking book, chapter 5 includes instructions for performing a location scout. Location scouting for a film is greatly simplified if you use a standard form to record information about the locations when you visit them.

…rambling…

I usually just take off on a location scouting job with my cameras, a compass and a notebook; the Location Scouting Template seems a little more organized, I might try it next time out.

Curious if there is a little script or program for location scouting notes that could be used in a pda? …not that I was ever that much of a “pda person”… I bought a Handspring Visor (obsolete?) a couple of years ago and seems like all it ever did was sit in its recharger cradle (the rechargable battery seems to be “kaputt” now…replacement available? cost? (I heard they were expensive?), if I took the Visor out I would always seem to forget I did that, the battery would run down, I’d lose all my phone numbers and addresses and I’d have to set it up all over again and synch it; it just never quite fit completely into my “modus operandi”.

A lot of times I have to take a laptop location scouting anyway and I have an address book in that, phone numbers of any immediate importance get scribbled down in notes or are in my cellphone…

Nowadays with Android Tablets, Android Phones, iPhones and iPads it is possible to manage much of our location data digitally.

Android Tablets at Amazon

Android Smartphones at Amazon

Apple iPads at Amazon

Apple iPhones at Amazon

Did you know? Ipod 80gb Classic seems to have an address book and calendar but I haven’t really played with those parts of it yet, been pretty busy getting my music loaded in it. …but the Ipod is *Great*!- I’m just lovin’ it!

Location Scouting & Management Handbook

A while back I reviewed Amazon.com | Location Scouting and Management Handbook | Television, Film and Still Photography| Robert Maier | Books

Amazon Editorial Review of Location Scouting & Management Handbook:

Discover what makes an excellent location, how to manage the location and how to handle any problems that might come up.

…read the rest…

Location Scout R. Richard Hobbs Review – Location Scouting & Management Handbook:

I also bought this book back in the ’90’s and lent it to an associate who never returned it!

The person I loaned it to knew very little of location scouting and location management and since I never got the book back I can only assume they found it very useful…

Perhaps this novice level of reader was the target audience; the book does give some of the basic ‘mechanics’ and duties expected of a location professional but does not go into the many intracies of diplomacy and, as an example, being able to purvey to a lay property owner in a succinct way what you are doing, what production will be doing, what is expected of them and what is in it for them.

…read the rest…

…I went on to say (among other things) that I thought the book needed an update, the book was grounded in ’80’s – ’90’s vintage technology and I didn’t think the book accurately addressed current challenges and practices of a digital-age location scout.

Location Scouting and Management Handbook is currently out of print. The copy I bought was a paperback edition (as is currently listed on Amazon…) when I bought it new it was maybe $20 – $25:

Location Scouting and Management Handbook: Television, Film and Still Photography

I probably would have more careful loaning my copy out had I known it would be a collectors edition! LOL 😉

Location Scout R. Richard Hobbs Amazon Profile

Location Scout R. Richard Hobbs Amazon Reviews Feed

Location scout R. Richard Hobbs Amazon aStore

Location Scouting at Amazon

Location Scout Resource: BananAlbum!

BananAlbum

BananAlbum is a highly customizable image viewing application which enables you to create single albums or a full featured portfolio site.

Bananalbum itself is a skin that needs to be dropped into a local installation of JAlbum (Windows), a free photo album creation program. Bananalbum creates the necessary files for the web photo album, which you then upload to your website. All these tasks can be completed inside a running copy of JAlbum. If you are using a Mac, look on the Bananalbum website, there is Album Creator for Mac.

There is also a Picasa template available on the Bananalbum website.

With tweaks bananr.com or Bananalbum could be useful to a location scout. Your mileage may vary with your experience as a webmaster.

Actually, the presentation below this text is Bananr running locally and embedded using an iframe.

Welcome to bananr.com; The most elegant way to show your Flickr images! It’s as simple as entering your user- or photoset id!

Bananr

Bananr uses your Flickr i.d. to create a photo album using your Flickr photos.
Here is my Bananr running on the bananr.com website.
You can only display ALL your Flickr photos this way (hey, whatta you want? it’s free) and admittedly your Flickr photos page can do the same thing. (Here’s mine).
bananr.com is very simple: Just surf to bananr.com, follow the instructions to retrieve your Flickr i.d. using idgettr and plug it in to the bananr.com form and away you go!There are more options available if you download and install Bananr to your own website.

Location Scout Flickriver

Location Scout R. Richard Hobbs (RRichardHobbs)’s most interesting photos.

About Flickriver

Flickriver is a web-based Flickr viewer that allows viewing hundreds of photos quickly and easily, in one seamless ‘river of photos’ view – never needing to hit ‘next’ to load the next page.

Location Scout R. Richard Hobbs at Flickriver

Location Scout Resources: Research Resources

Location Scout Resources: Scholarly Research Resources

These are research resources a location scout might typically find in a large college / university research library, altho, howver, possibly expensively, could possibly be subscribed to directly.

Location Scout Resource: Journal of Popular Film and Television

How did Casablanca affect the home front during World War II? What is the postfeminist significance of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? The Journal of Popular Film and Television answers such far-ranging questions by using the methods of popular culture studies to examine commercial film and television, historical and contemporary. Articles discuss networks, genres, series, and audiences, as well as celebrity stars, directors, and studios.

Journal of Popular Film and Television – Wikipedia

Journal of Popular Film and Television (print: ISSN 0195-6051, online: ISSN 1930-6458) is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Routledge, which purchased it from Heldref Publications in 2009. Michael Marsden, who was the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Northern Michigan University in the late 1990s, co-founded the journal. The journal began in 1972.

Location Scout Resource: Film Literature Index Home

The Film Literature Index (FLI) annually indexes 150 film and television periodicals from 30 countries cover-to-cover and 200 other periodicals selectively for articles on film and television. The periodicals range from the scholarly to the popular. More than 2,000 subject headings provide detailed analysis of the articles.

Location Scout Resource: Tell Twitter your location

Location Scouts are ALL about maps and geo-anything! 🙂 Do you use Twitter at all when working as a location scout?

Location Aware! Mashable: Now You Can Tell Twitter Where You Are – Now You Can Tell Twitter Where You Are | November 19th, 2009 | by Barb Dybwad

Twitter announced it would be adding locations to your tweets back in August, and they’ve been making changes to their API to enable the functionality since late September. The geolocation functionality is now complete, and a number of developers of third-party apps who have been working on building location support into their applications should begin rolling out the new features soon.

Location Scout Resource: Montclair State University Film Forum

Film Forum Schedule Announced! | Series brings award-winning filmmakers to campus to discuss the art and business of filmmaking

Tuesdays from 7:00 – 10:00 pm
Location: University Hall, Rm 1040– open to all – admission free
Sponsored by the Montclair State University Film Program
Contact: Roberta Friedman, Visiting Filmmakers Coordinator, 973-655-7282

Montclair State University’s Film Forum brings prominent contemporary filmmakers to campus to screen their films and speak about their work and the profession. Sponsored by the Filmmaking Program of the College of the Arts, the screening and discussion series is held every Tuesday from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. in University Hall Room 1040, and is free and open to all students and the general public.

As in previous years, the Forum will feature noted industry professionals and filmmakers such as Henry Bean, writer of INTERNAL AFFAIRS, award-winning writer/director of THE BELIEVER, and Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, producers of the award winning film TROUBLE THE WATER, as well as Michael Moore’s FAHRENHEIT 9/11 and BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE.. The Forum offers a unique opportunity for audiences to hear personal inside stories and to ask questions of some of the most successful and innovative filmmakers working today.

Montclair State University Film Students Seeking Summer Internships

Professor Tony Pemberton, from the Montclair State University Film School, Montclair, NJ recently contacted me requesting assistance placing his film students in intern positions during the coming summer months.

If you are a bona fide film production company or other relevant film or broadcast industry professional and there is room in your organization to help a film student gain some valuable industry experience please contact Professor Pemberton.

Location Scout Resource: NYPG (New York Production Guide) On-Line Resource

With vital information in all areas of industry standardized AICP (Association of Independendent Commercial Producers) bid form, film and videotape production information is now more accessible allowing for thorough and professional research, estimating, pre-production, and post-production.

nyc.locationscout.us / R. Richard Hobbs listing at NYPG

Order NYPG direct from Publisher

Google Search: NYPG

Location Scout Google Custom Search

You can perform a search of nyc.locationscout.us content using Google Custom Search with the search box in the footer (scroll to the bottom of the page).

Google Custom Search – Wikipedia

Google Custom Search (formerly known as Google Co-op) is a platform provided by Google that allows web developers to feature specialized information in web searches, refine and categorize queries and create customized search engines, based on Google Web Search. Google launched the service on May 10, 2006.

With Google Custom Search, you can harness the power of Google to create a customized search experience for your own website.

Many thanks to Aleem Bawany for tips on how-to do this 🙂

Please Note! Location Searches require a separate search (locamundo)

Dummies Location Scout Book

Dummies::Picking Locations for Your Film

Yep, there HAD to be one 😉 The ubiquitous “…For Dummies” page- for location scouting… 😉

After you’ve locked down your script – meaning there are no more changes – comb through it and determine where you want to shoot your scenes. Some software programs, like Screenwriter 2000, actually break down your script for you by pulling out all your scene headings and generating a list of settings from your screenplay.

Ok, ok, I have poked fun at ’em, but Dummies (Wiley Publishing) is HUGE – the rest of us are a bunch of Dummies for not coming up with the Dummies idea! Dummies is worldwide, offices all over the planet, baby! Oh, man their North American office is right in Hoboken!

Location Scout Google News Updates

Google News is a world-wide internet source of syndicated news on a world of subjects.

Of course, here at nyc.locationscout.us, since I am in fact, a location scout and location manager, news on the specific subject of location scouting is of keen interest!

Google News Feed: location scout

Other subjects of interest:

Location Scout Google Blog Search – About Google Blog Search

What is Blog Search?

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves.

Search below for blog content on a variety of location services and production topics via Google Blog Search results:

Search below for blog content on a variety of location services and production topics delivered as RSS Feeds:

Other Resources:

Location Scout Yahoo News Updates – Search Yahoo News on the subjects of: “location scout” (feed excerpt included below), “location scouts”, “location manager”, “location managers”, “film location”, “film locations”, “film production” NYC, “film production” “New York”, “film production” “New York City”, “film production” NY, “film production” “New Jersey”, “film production” NJ, “film office”, “film offices”, “film commission”, “film commissions”.

On the landing page(s) you can generate an RSS feed (look for the orange / white “RSS” button) if you wish to subscribe to content based on the search terms using a news reader application.

Yahoo News: location scout feed

Other subjects of interest:

Location Scout Movie Website Widgets

I made a Movie Widgets Page, containing several WidgetBox movie information widgets but alas, WidgetBox has changed their business model and the movie widgets are nowhere to be found 🙁 (at least they are not where they used to be? 🙁 … Widgets were HUGE (sort of…) in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. Now the term seems to mean something similar… but different – “Widget” usually refers to a mobile smartphone application that displays information on the viewing screen of the smartphone.

So maybe the demise of widgets is not such a bad thing after all?

WordPress plugin: Amazon Product in a Post is great 🙂

Here are a couple of IMDB-related Google Gadgets – pretty much as close as you come any more to the thingamajigger formerly known as “widgets” ;). The Google Gadgets Page is a pretty big mess itself these days, half the gadets don’t work – so depending on when you read this post the gadgets may or may not work themselves.

Film & TV Research at Amazon

Twitter at Amazon

Google at Amazon

MSN Movies

Read reviews, watch trailers and clips, find showtimes, view celebrity photos and more on MSN Movies

Location Scout Resource: Downloadable Location Surveys / Scouting Reports @ Videomaker

I haven’t bought it, but for $2.99 how bad could you possibly get ripped off LOL? Maybe it’s incredibly useful …and worth 10x $2.99? Feelin’ lucky?

Videomaker Magazine :: Downloadables :: https://www.videomaker.com/shop/digital-downloads/video-production-forms/book-of-forms-location-surveys-scouting-reports.html">Book of Forms – Location Surveys/Scouting Reports

Includes: Location Scouting Report and Video Location Scouting Form | SKU PDFBOF45 | Price: $2.99

…read the rest…

Videomaker Magazine also has a web page of downloadable free software:

Videomaker’s Editors have compiled this list of what they think are the most useful video editing and video related software downloads on the Web. If you have any suggestions of products you think we should add to this list, please email your suggestions to our Editorial department.

…read the rest…

Videomaker at Amazon

Location Scout Resource: Google Free Online Calendar

Location scouting is production work. Production work is done on a schedule, to a schedule. Times and dates are a big part of the picture. Nuff said?

A lot of location scouting and location management tasks also involve working online, so it is helpful to have at one’s disposal online and / or electronic time management resources and the skills to use them.

One such resource is Google Calendar. As with many tools Google, Google Calendar is free.

If you have never used Google Calendar:

You will need a Google account. Go there. Get an account. It’s free and you can open Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Maps, Notebook, Docs, Picasa Photos, Chat accounts and take advantage of many other useful productivity tools for free or cheap.

Ya got little to lose.*

*(full disclosure motivates me to mention there are parties (ref 1) (ref 2) who consider Google a danger to personal privacy, but I have never personally had any reservations about using Google.

In any case, this post is sposed to be about Google Calendar… It is beyond the scope of this post to teach you to use Google Calendar, or any other Google tools (a lot of it is basic computer skills and plain common sense – you have to be motivated to apply yourself at least just a little!) however here are a couple of resources I found for help making the most of Google Calendar:

Location Scout Resource: An Embedded Flickr Slideshow

…via Paul Stamatiou HOW TO Quickie: Embedded Flickr Slideshows

Yet another web trick the aspiring location scout might want for presenting locations.

The embedding code makes use of an iframe or embed tag. I prefer the embed tag.

Hover your mouse over the slideshow window and celebrate the ajax!

Paul Stamamatiou Feed

Flickr now has a slideshow option for your photostream or any set, as highlighted in the screenshot below. Follow the link on your own page and the slideshow will appear, if you look in the far upper right hand corner of the slideshow you will see a “Share” link, follow that and you find options giving you the url of the slideshow and code to customize the slideshow for embedding it in a website.

Flickr PhotoStream page with the Slideshow link highlighted

Flickr at Amazon

times-square-skyline1 © 2020 Copyright R. Richard Hobbs / nyc.locationscout.us

Location Scout Resource: Location Aware Mobile Web Applications

– location-aware mobile applications for smartphones and tablets are all the rage nowadays. You may or may not be aware of some of them (but who » isn’t «) using Facebook lately? 😉 Somewhere in the mix you should be able to find a couple that are useful to you if you are a location scout. A huge bonus is very, very many useful mobile apps are FREE 🙂

While most mobile applications offer some sort of desktop portal or user interface, to reiterate, we are talking about mobile applications here, whereby users connect with the applications’ services via mobile smartphone or tablet, i.e iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, etc. using a mobile version of the application and / or via a website constructed specifically for access by mobile devices. Being location-based, these types of applications generally interface with the mobile devices’ gps capabilities and some, such as Google Maps Mobile / Google Maps Mobile Navigation, have the ability to triangulate the user’s position via cel towers in use by the users’ celular phone services provider. Many are focused mainly on social networking, however, some, such as Google Maps (again) have more utilitarian uses (keep reading).

As a side note, these types of services normally offer a way to download and install their application directly using your mobile device “over the air” (ota) or even more likely will direct you to a mobile applications portal such as:

Android Market

iPhone App Store

BlackBerry App World

Location-Aware Applications at Amazon

Amazon Android App Store

Windows Phone Store

Please note: there are MANY third-party website repositories of mobile applications and while most are on the up-and-up, when downloading mobile applications from an “indie” website, there is a far greater chance of running into problems, i.e faulty / hacked applications and / or rogue apps that can damage your equipment or steal sensitive personal info. There aren’t, as far as I know, many mainstream ways to scan mobile apps for viruses and other umm, “customizations”. This is one situation in which I would very strongly advise sticking with the “big boys”.

It is pretty crazy to try to categorize the different applications as each app’s uniqueness revolves around the way it “mashes up” different features … below is my attempt to (sort of?) categorize some of them. In addition to my own profile for each service that I use, for the sake of brevity, I have listed the main sites for each of the services, there you will find instructions for accessing each service’s mobile features and / or directions for downloading and installing their mobile application. Anyway, here goes…

Some location-aware web applications include:

Social Networking

Plazes | Location Scout R. Richard Hobbs Plazes Profile (1)
Facebook | Location Scout R. Richard Hobbs Facebook Page (1)
Foursquare | Location Scout R. Richard Hobbs Foursquare Profile (1)
Gowalla | Location Scout R. Richard Hobbs Gowalla Profile (1)

(1) applications generally used for “checking in”, or announcing one’s physical location. Depending on the service, a photo or even video can be included in the check in.

Location-Aware Mobile Microblogging

Historical Movie Location Reference

Ever wondered which movies were filmed at or near your current location?

Location Scout

Location-Aware Maps, Navigation, Weather

Admittedly, in this section I am being very impartial, as Google Maps is just about all I use for mapping and navigation. There – it has been said. As a location scout and producer, I have used Google Maps to prepare route maps and logistics plans / proposals as well as production itineraries; suffice to say I have used Google Maps in particular as a productivity tool far beyond any social networking application.

Google Maps | Location Scout R. Richard Hobbs -Google Places | Location Scout R. Richard Hobbs – Google+

View New York City Area Location Scout » Location Scout News 4-29-2012 in a larger map

Traffic, Transportation, Parking

Primospot – find free parking in several major U.S. cities
HopStop

To summarize, while this post will get you started, you really just have to get out there and look around for yourself to figure out what apps with which features work best for your own personal needs and preferences. Happy Hunting!

p.s. if you find anything discussed here in this post the slightest bit interesting, you might also want to check out:

Yahoo Fire Eagle

About Location Scout R. Richard Hobbs