Scout

"Where should I film given that my scene is set in the Swiss Alps but I'm based in San Francisco?"

The map below, created by Hollywood location scouts, suggests you to drive around San Benito Mountain, or maybe up near Tahoe.

Paramount Studios Location Map, 1927

Scout explores a data-driven method of creating a similar, more expansive map. As a proof of concept, it provides a command-line tool that takes a city name as input and returns a short-list of cities to be considered as alternate filming locations.

Methodology

Location scouts consider two fundamental factors when selecting a filming site: aesthetics and logistic feasibility.

To quantify the aesthetic resemblances between cities, I created a survey on Crowdflower's data annotation platform asking people to rate images of cities in similarity. The images were scraped from Flickr and included three types of city shots - skylines, aerial views, and street views. Each type of shot was compared against other images of the same type.

Example question for the data annotation task

The resulting dataset included 66k responses and allowed me to calculate "visual similarity scores" for pairs of cities.

Scout then weighs each city's visual similarity score by its distance from the user's base location, thereby incorporating logistic feasibility into its output.