Techies map Indian Movie Locations
By Suneetha B

Indian films make you travel, vicariously. You must have seen Ooty, Goa, Kashmir, as well as Tokyo, Paris and London in films. But ever wanted to find where a film was shot? Techies and movie lovers Amar Rameshbabu and Filbert P Devasahayam,  who met while doing their Masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in USA,  have researched and mapped most Indian films.

Their site wherewasitshot.com draws visitors from every corner of the world.  In India, it is especially  popular in Bangalore and Chennai.

Techgoss (TG): Please do introduce yourselves

Filbert/Rameshbabu (F&R):

Filbert - grew up in Madurai, went to Madras Institute of Technology in Chennai for UG and came over to the US for Masters in 2001 (University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio), and has been working as a software engineer with a software services providing company called iLink Systems here in Bellevue, Washington for the last 8 years.

Amar - grew up in Chennai, went to Sathyabhama in Chennai for UG and came over to the US for Masters in 2002 (University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio), worked in the same company - iLink Systems - until September 2010 when his love for the country and passion for the profession inspired him to return back to India and also adopt photography as his full-time profession.

(TG): How are you two connected? Classmates / neighbours / colleagues? Just give us how you connected and how this common interest happened... any back story on this would be interesting
(F&R)We both met in Toledo, Ohio in 2002, as we were both enrolled for our Masters degrees in the same department (Electrical Engineering & Computer Science). We both are huge Tamil movie & music fans and more than that, share an unbridled admiration for Superstar Rajinikanth. In fact, when Amar reached Toledo in 2002 (just before the time Baba was released) and he was looking for some contact in the University who could help him watch the movie FDFS. That's when one of our common friends introduced Filbert to him (when Filbert was reading some latest news about Baba, no less). We both love traveling (have done so much travel together here in the US) and that coupled with our love for Indian movies is what finally led to us to launch the site.

(TG): How did the idea of Wherewasitshot come up?
(F&R)Like mentioned earlier, we both are avid movie fans, especially of Hindi, Tamil & Telugu movies. Every time, we watch a song that was shot in a unique location, we would go 'How cool would it be to find out where that location is and then may be, visit that location?' It is this quest that used to send us on wild-goose chases on the internet trying to figure out where the song or the scene was filmed. Discussion forums, comments section of YouTube videos. Google searches and movies blogs were some of the places we would frequently haunt to find out these locations. That is when the idea of developing a site that caters to this unique need - documenting filming locations used in Indian movies - came up. We found out that though there were a few sites that did what we intended to do, for Hollywood movies, there was none whatsoever for Indian movies. Thus was born the idea for wherewasitshot.com

(TG): How did you go about developing it into its current space and shape, did you divide tasks? You live in different time zones, how easy/difficult was the co-ordination of the task?
(F&R): We decided to use Wordpress for our site development and after a lot of thought, decided on the template that you currently see on the web. Amar was still in Bellevue when we both launched the site. So, it was easier to work together. Between us, it has always been that Amar is more into site management and promoting the WhereWasItShot brand in whatever way he can, while I (Filbert) do most of the data management tasks. Google Wave (anyone remember it anymore?) was the platform that we were actually using quite a lot for the coordination of our day-to-day tasks (status tracking, mostly).

(TG): How did you choose the contents as they are shown on the site?
(F&R): We started off with one of the Wordpress templates that was available. Then we customized the site to look like the way it appears now. We wanted users to be able to browse through the complete list of locations, either through the 'Complete List' page or through the People page or the Location Category page. The slideshow on the home page rotates through the last 10 published posts. The Location page is the centerpiece of the site where we wanted to capture pretty much what the users wants to know about the location - About the location, Movies shot at the location, Youtube videos of the songs/ scenes, Slideshow (if we get enough pictures of the site) and Google Map of the location. The side bar on the Location page currently has the last 5 locations that have been posted under each language. we have also used numerous plugins that add so much usability to the site - NextGEN Gallery, Contact Form, Configurable Tag Cloud, to name a few.

(TG): What has been the response to the site? Has there been any contributions from the public?
(F&R): The response to begin with was very feeble, as most didn't know that such a site existed. We started contacting some popular bloggers, requesting them to mention the site in their blogs / tweets. Our good friend & popular blogger Balaji Balasubramanian (bbthots.com) was very kind enough to let us to a guest post about our site on his blog. Others than we contacted for getting the word out about the site were Kiruba Shankar and Karthik Srinivasan, who both tweeted about the site. Sidin Vadukut, managing editor of livemint.com also did a post about the site. Once all these mentions happened, the traffic started picking up. We also promoted the site actively through our Facebook page. And the fact that we are adding almost a location every single day, is also helping us, we are getting the attention of the search engines. As far as contributions from the public go, there definitely has been some but not as much as we had hoped (primarily because many weren't aware of the site until recently when The Hindu did an article on our site). But users have indeed contributed new locations and have also pointed out many errors in our published posts.

(TG): Can you tell us more about the traffic to the site? What are the patterns of traffic from IT/BPO hubs in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune and Gurgaon?
(F&R): Traffic to the site remained in the 300-400 visits per day until The Hindu did an article on our site. After that, the hits have skyrocketed with us constantly hitting 500-600 hits a day. One traffic pattern that readers of Techgoss will be interested is the technical profile of the site's visitors as far as the browser that is being used - IE, Chrome & Firefox each are being used by 30% of our users with Safari being used by 8% and Opera being used by 2%.    51% of the site's traffic is through referring sites (Facebook, we believe, as we post a location a day in our Facebook page), 30 % through search engines and the remaining 19% through direct visitors. The country-wise breakdown of our visitors is as follows - 46.5 % from India, 30% from the US, 4% from the UK and 2% each from Australia, Singapore, Canada & Germany. Breaking down that number further, the city-wise breakdown of our visitors looks something like: Chennai at 14%, Bangalore at 10%, Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune & Mumbai at 2% each and visitors from all other cities contribute less than 2% to the site's hits. Apart from the 6 cities listed above, Singapore, Kolkata, New York City and Coimbatore round off the top 10 cities from where we get the maximum hits.

(TG): What do you plan to do further, include more languages, diversify?
(F&R): We have some ambitious plans for the short term and long term future. A total redesign of the site is part of our immediate plans, along with a host of introducing new features like a 'Locations on a map', 'Submit your location', 'Nearby Locations'. There are also plans to include the locations from movies made in languages that have a sizeable film industry - Malayalam and Kannada. A feature where we introduce a new location (that hasn't hitherto been used as a filming location) every week is also in the pipeline. In the long term, the plan is to work with travel agents across the country and offer users instant access to means & ways for them to get to these wonderful locations.

(TG): Anything else you would like to tell our readers?
(F&R): We are always on the lookout for constructive feedback about our work. So, we would be pleased to hear any such input from your readers. And if they happen to be movie buffs like us, your readers can pitch in to contribute new locations to the site and pinpoint any shortcomings / inaccuracies in the site. If you like what we are doing, please 'Like' us in Facebook at facebook.com/wherewasitshot

(Photo: (From Left) Amar with Filbert)