“Before the website was set up, Mark took a look at the competition. “I quickly realised that no one was really doing a thorough job at showcasing New York film locations,” says Mark. “There were some websites that briefly mentioning a variety of the popular NYC films, but none mentioning indies or the less popular films from the seventies or eighties films.”

In the 10 years since the launch of the website, the overall design is much the same. “The original template had the New York skyline above the menu options, whereas today it has rotating film banners combined with smaller ads on either side of the content. The main reason for this is so that the less important pages don’t necessarily get missed.” Mark adds, “I regularly look at the web-stats, and besides the films ‘Sex and the City’, ‘Home Alone 2’, ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’, ‘Ghostbusters’, ‘When Harry Met Sally’, and ‘You’ve Got Mail’, it’s actually the film location maps that are amongst the most viewed part of the website.”

With the success of otsoNY.com, there have been discussions about covering other US cities such as Chicago and San Francisco. “A few years ago, I started work on otsoFS.com, which would showcase films from San Francisco such as Basic Instinct, The Rock, and Serendipity, but as I hadn’t visited the city, I found it just as difficult and time-consuming as it had been when I first started researching New York in 2009. I think once you’ve been to a place, and I mean, when you’ve walked around a city and observed the streets, the buildings, the parks etc., that’s when you really start to know a place and recognise things that will eventually help you pinpoint film locations. So at the moment, there are no plans to launch otsoFS.com any time soon. As for the future, I’m planning to visit New York in the summer of 2020, and as I prepare for that trip, I’m going to update the film location maps,” reveals Mark. “I think it is important to include as many film titles on the maps as possible, but due to their current scale and limited space, I will probably end up having to rebuild them from scratch".

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