What this site is, how a place gets on it, and what is left out on purpose.
ShotHere records where films were shot: the building, the street, the stretch of coast. Every place here carries a coordinate.
A place appears on this site when a source we read in full names it as a filming location. Another film-location list is not a source. The coordinate is set on the building, not on the town. Where the claim rests on one source, the text says so. Where we could not find out, the text says that too.
Opening hours, ticket prices, tour dates. They go stale faster than we can re-check them, and a price that is no longer true is as wrong as one that never was. Also missing: places listed in a database with no reference behind them and no scene attached.
The photographs are other people's work, used under licences that allow it. The photographer and the licence are named under each one.
ShotHere is researched and written by K. Whitcomb. It is one person's work, not a newsroom.
Three things meet in it: good films, travel, and a bit of detective work.
A film leaves you with a place you have seen and cannot name — a stairway, a bend in a road, a doorway with the light coming in from one side. Finding out where it stands ought to take a minute. It rarely does. The answer, where there is one, is in a film commission's card, a local paper from that summer, one line in an interview, a DVD commentary nobody has written down — and a good deal of what has been written down is wrong.
Because the place on screen is usually wearing another place's name. Prague plays Vienna, candles and all. A castle in County Meath plays the city of York. And Scotland's war for its own independence was fought five hundred kilometres away on an Irish plain, by 1,600 soldiers of the Irish Defence Forces given leave to grow beards — the same men charging in both directions.
That gap — between the place you saw and the place it actually was — is what this site is for.
The work is reading. Everything written about a film's locations is gone through in full; the places named in it are checked against maps and against each other; what does not survive that is left out rather than softened. The photographs are other people's, and they are credited as such.
Whitcomb has not stood on most of these spots, and the pages do not pretend otherwise. Where being there would have settled a question that nobody has written down, the page says the question is open.