18 September 2019

As otsoNY prepares to celebrate its 10th Birthday on 1st November, we take a brief look back to the early days and the original batch of films that were first posted on the film location website. In May 2009, six months before the launch of the website “On The Set of New York” as it would originally be known as, a small batch of films were selected for location research, more from interest than any particular genre or year. Certain scenes were selected and locations confirmed from various online sources. A visit to New York City allowed for the locations to be photographed and stored in electronic format. An idea for a website only came about in October 2009, after the film location images were initially turned down by Lindsay Blake, creator of the established online film location blog “Iamnotastalker.com”. Though her blog mentioned a variety of New York films, it was primary an LA based film location website, and she had no interest in forging a partnership, which ultimately lead to the launch of otsoNY.com. The First Batch of Films Posted on otsoNY.com

The creator behind otsoNY.com, Mark Rogers still recalls many of the reasons as why these films were chosen. “It purely came down to my interest in these particular films, and more than likely the actors who starred in them,” explained Mark. “Much of my misspent youth was in the 1980s, when movies such as ‘Crocodile Dundee’, ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’, ‘You've Got Mail’ and ‘Delirious’ were all fairly light-hearted, and easily watchable four or five times over. They also contained a lot of New York locations, which really did interest me, but what I didn’t know at the time was that New York architecture changes by the day, and when I first visited the city, I was faced with a lot of disappointment, mainly through the closure of restaurants and shops that had featured in these films.”

The process for matching screen shots and promotional film images to real life locations was first achieved with the use of Google Street View. Mark recalls, “In early 2009, Google Street View was in its early stages, and though they had covered much of New York, the actual quality of the images was fairly poor, though essentially it was a very useful tool for producing the film location street maps that are still available on the website, and probably should have been updated by now!”

As the clock ticks down to the 10th celebration, otsoNY will host a number of News Stories throughout October detailing the early days of the website, its original design, and the reasons behind the first batch of films.