British Film Locations

Visit Britain is a tourists and convention bureau which aims to market Britain to the rest of the world and to promote and develop the English visitor economy.

The website contains a wide range of information for people planning a holiday to the UK, detailing hotels and accommodation, destinations, events information, transport, reviews and much more.

Visit Britain approached etv online with an idea of creating an iPhone application which allows users to find and photograph the most iconic British film locations in cinematic history.

The application was to enable Visit Britain to capitalise on the launch of upcoming releases by customising the home screen of the application, which for the launch of the application was the Sherlock Holmes film.

Help people in the UK to find and photograph the most iconic British film locations in cinematic history. This application will not only map out the most famous film scenes around your Google maps location, it will allow you to search by film title so you can discover an entire Great British film tour whether you're looking for Harry Potter's Hogwarts or one of the Braveheart battlefields. Each film location is accompanied by a detailed synopsis and description of how to find it.
  • To allow users to search for films and discover the locations that they have been shot in
  • To creates interest from the press/public once promoted
  • To ultimately generates more Tourist revenue for the UK economy by generating traffic from abroad
  • For visit Britain increase the size of their CRM database
  • For all elements of the iPhone app functions as like a professionally constructed program against the iPhone API
  • To make the application work on both iPhone and iPod touch handsets

The iPhone application consists of a database of films, with each film having its own page containing the synopsis followed by a list of locations which are relevant to the film. These locations are places of interest which have featured in scenes of the film, for example Leadenhall Market for the Harry Potter movies, or Liverpool Street Station for Mission Impossible.

The application uses the iPhone’s built in GPS to display the distance of the location to the user in miles, with an option to show the location on a map.

Upon launch of the application users have the choice whether to search films by location or film name. There is also an option to view the featured movie, which will be changed periodically. This featured movie tab contains the film trailer as well as the synopsis and locations.

Another feature of this application is the integrated camera functionality. At any point within the application users have access to a camera button which launches the iPhones built in camera and allows users to take a picture. The user will then be able to use the photo and upload to facebook.

The Great British Film Location App has been a massive success since it's launch.

In the first week of launch, Apple took it upon themselves to place your app in the 'Top Free Featured List' and it was mentioned in the 'New and Noteworthy' section of the app store.

The app also has a spot in the 'Top Free Travel Apps' alongside Google Earth, Tube Map and FT Travel Guides. All of this meant the app had a lot of free PR and had a flurry of downloads in the first week of launch and has been steadily growing since then.

etv online have gone on to create this application in Android and Symbian in order to reach a larger percentage of the public.