…via Mark McKennon…

NY Times | Lights! Camera! Ka-Ching! | By VIVIAN S. TOY | Published: July 20, 2008

“NEW YORKERS love to complain about television or film crews that descend on their neighborhoods, gobbling up parking spaces, crowding the sidewalks and generally disrupting daily life.

But some people aren’t complaining. They are the ones who are renting their apartments and houses to those crews, and making $500 to $10,000 a day, depending on the size and duration of a production…”

“…The movie and television production industry is big business in New York City, generating about $5 billion in the local economy each year, according to the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting…”

“…As a final word of caution, Ms. Gordon of AKA Locations said that homeowners often come to the business a bit starry-eyed and that she often tries to lift that veil of fantasy a bit.

“They need to be prepared to be invaded and not expect to make too much money,” she said. “And once you sign on for it, you have to let go and let it happen, because once you let them into your house, they’re not leaving until they’re finished.”

…read the entire article…

NYT > Real Estate

• Big Deal: Conan O’Brien Sells Duplex for $25 Million | Friday, 30 July 2010, 10:07 pm
  The talk show host sold his duplex for more than $4 million below his asking price.
• Yikes! It’s a Garage | Friday, 30 July 2010, 9:46 pm
  The building of few private garages has set off municipal alarm bells. Fearing copycats, the city has moved swiftly to tighten the rules.
• Square Feet | The 30-Minute Interview: Andy Frankl | Friday, 30 July 2010, 9:46 pm
  Questions for the president and founder of IBEX Construction, a company based in New York that specializes in stores and commercial interiors.

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© 2008, nyc.locationscout.us. All rights reserved.

Beach Houses Location Album


Beach Houses Location Album

Location Scouting Notes:

Other Location Scouting notes:

Other Location Scouting / Production Information

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© 2008, nyc.locationscout.us. All rights reserved.

More House Facts

More Location Scouting Notes

Slideshow
Preview set on Flickr

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© 2008, nyc.locationscout.us. All rights reserved.

“Ikea has added hundreds of parking spaces to its Red Hook store in advance of the hotly anticipated opening on Wednesday, June 18, which is expected to draw a cavalcade of shoppers that will continue for months.”

…read the rest…

I hereby declare Red Hook “gentrified” with regard, as reported above, that the new Ikea will open June 18th, 2008.

I have written elsewhere on nyc.locationscout.us about the changing face of Red Hook and other areas in the New York metro. (Take a peak at The Brooklyn Paper’s photo that accompanies the story above – also here is a Google Images search result for “Ikea Red Hook”. My own post mentioned above, Final Days, has photos of the Ikea property when it was the New York Shipyard.

Arguably, the Shipyard was more fertile ground for location scouts, no?

…alas, one finds, with the wisdom of age, that the only thing constant in life is change. I’ve tried to learn to accept this and grow from the knowledge.

• Google News search “Ikea Red Hook”

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© 2008, nyc.locationscout.us. All rights reserved.

“Subject: rental property for movies and tv commercials
Category: Arts and Entertainment | Asked by: cuccina-ga | Google Answers: rental property for movies and tv commercials: Q: rental property for movies and tv commercials ( Answered, 0 Comments )

Question | Subject: rental property for movies and tv commercials | Category: Arts and Entertainment | Asked by: cuccina-ga | List Price: $10.00 Posted: 29 Jan 2004 19:24 PST | Expires: 28 Feb 2004 19:24 PST | Question ID: 301666

Who to contact to rent your home to production companies for movies or commericals

Answer | Subject: Re: rental property for movies and tv commericals | Answered By: bobbie7-ga on 29 Jan 2004 21:13 PST

Hi Cuccina! How to get your home in the movies:

• Secure Production Permission – Make sure that production is allowed in your neighborhood. If it is:
• Contact your state or local film commission. They’ll help you get your home on the market for shoots. Or
• Get in touch with a location agent.”

…read the rest…

Also referenced at rrhobbs.com FAQS

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updated 5/9/2008 | added map, general cleanup | original timestamp May 22, 2006 at 12:43 pm

© 2008, nyc.locationscout.us. All rights reserved.

© 2008, nyc.locationscout.us. All rights reserved.

© 2008, nyc.locationscout.us. All rights reserved.

© 2008, nyc.locationscout.us. All rights reserved.

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• This videoblog post by David Pogue for his weekly tech column in the New York Times arrived in my inbox and I started feeling like I should, probably sooner rather than later, think more about backing up my ever-growing archive of location photos and other data I use as part of my livelihood.

  XML error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 25, column 11

  
• This post on TechCrunch got me doing something about it in an online way.
  TechCrunch

  • The Flickr Bogan-Martin Award For “Media Overreaction” | Saturday, 31 July 2010, 8:08 am
    One thing you can say about the Flickr team – there’s some fight in ‘em. They apparently were not super pleased with our coverage of their annual (and. […]
  • Paul Graham’s Checklist, Would You Make The Cut? [Video] | Saturday, 31 July 2010, 3:00 am
    With more than 200 deals since 2005, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham knows how to size up a young team of entrepreneurs. However, he didn’t get it right fr. […]
  • Chamillionaire Just Wants Your Business Card | Saturday, 31 July 2010, 1:32 am
    Grammy award winning artist Chamillionaire (a.k.a Hakeem Seriki) has become a regular at tech conferences, perhaps because the hustle and flow culture. […]
• Update 3/5/2008 – Mashable – July 28, 2007 — 04:50 AM PDT — by Sean P. Aune

  ONLINE STORAGE: 80+ File Hosting and Sharing Sites

  “From sending one document to backing up an entire business, data storage is the key to everything nowadays. Due to popular demand, we’ve put together a list of more than 80 of the leading file hosting services, many of which are completely free.” (…read the rest…)

  Mashable!

  • Our Favorite YouTube Videos This Week: The Mythology Edition | Saturday, 31 July 2010, 3:19 am
    Hello there, weary travelers, winding your way — LOTR-like — toward the glimmering horizon that is the weekend. Isn’t this is thing we call life. […]
  • BlackBerry Tablet Coming this November? [REPORT] | Saturday, 31 July 2010, 12:25 am
    BlackBerry tablet rumors continue to gain momentum, with a new report indicating that the device, possibly to be called the BlackPad, is set to hit st. […]
  • New Apple Patents Detail Plans for Travel, Clothing and Commerce | Friday, 30 July 2010, 10:49 pm
    A veritable treasure trove of documents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show some of the different ways that Apple is looking to integrate l. […]

Here’s the scenario- as a location scout, I deal with A LOT of photos- individually they are not unusually large files, but between scouting jobs and photos that people send me of their property, I look at and have to deal with organizing a heapo’ pictures on just about a daily basis! Not only that, in the location scouting biz, information is money so there have to be ways to access this visual information quickly(as well as the contact info and notes about each- but more on that later…).

The first place any photos go when I aquire them is a remote 160 GB Firewire (or IEEE 1394) hard drive pretty much dedicated to archiving location photos, shortly after which, especially if the photos were made for an in-progress location scouting job, they get uploaded to my Locamundo account for immediate use in an online location album and archived for permanent reference.

Call me paranoid but what if:

I have many of my files backed up locally on yet another local harddrive partition, but all these files on the same machine take up a lot of hardrive space. The cost is not such a problem in and of itself, harddrives get cheaper every day; however, all these files lying around in partitions on the same local harddrive(s) do nothing to help speed along more mundane tasks such as searching for files, whether they be related to location scouting scouting or not and really increase the time it takes for my anti-virus program to do its daily scan of my system. I defragment my hardrives regularly to help keep them speedy and healthy and lots of files make that go much slower as well.

Purchasing additional removable drives might be the way to go.

In “the real world”, the fact is, once my files are uploaded and keyworded on Locamundo, I may not ever need to touch them again, or if I do it is likely to be a long time before I do, but the fact remains that I cant just delete them.

Enter online storage solutions.

Right now I am trying out MediaMax Streamload. Streamload is the name of a Windows program ditributed by MediaMax which runs locally(on my computer) as a service and provides a secure network link to my private file storage account on MediaMax’s server. At this writing, MediaMax provides a free 25GB account, upgradable to provide more storage space. Then next upgrade level is 100GB for $4.95 per month, which is very affordable and which I might move up to as soon as I figure out why Streamload is hanging when I try to access the local folders where my files are located. I like the online solutions, they do backups on their end as well.

But…like I said, I gotta lotta files, it could be a matter of organizing them differently so the Streamload application doesnt cease to respond. Compared to local drives, an internet connection, from dialup all the way up to heavy-duty broadband connections are pretty lightweight. You can cram just so much info in a data pipe at time. It’s always something…

Update: After opening a free Media Max account and downloading and running the Streamload Beta, when I used it to find my files to upload, the program hung and had to be forced closed. Kinda defeated the purpose of using proprietary software whose stated purpose was to facilitate uploading large numbers of files simply and quickly. When I needed to do a restart my entire system hung. I rebooted to safe mode and to try and uninstall Streamload that way but its uninstaller would not work in safe mode. I had noticed that Streamload was running as a Windows Service so I disabled it there, rebooted normally and uninstalled Streamload. Summarily, it didnt seem to play well with my system, your mileage may vary.

Hmm, maybe there are some Bittorrent solutions out there? In addition to bittorrents typically taking a LONG time (this is my experience- again, your mileage may vary), they rely on a pool of people sharing a file to pass the pieces to each other and the Bittorrent app takes up recources while it is working- I dont wanna share my files with others and sometime I have to have a lot of programs open on my computer that I need to be running full steam- I sure dont need bog-downs and crashes trying to make a deadline! Still, gotta look into that a little more

CD’s/DVD’s you say? Been there, done that. Takes forever, ties up computer resources and the media (the cd’s/ dvd’s) data deteriorates over time. I have two crates of cd’s that I have used to back up files over the years and everytime I put one in the cd drive, if it is more than a year or two old, there is a good chance it is unreadable- corrupted. I have cd’s going on ten years old, I probably have a lot of files I may never again have access to. File recovery is VERY time consuming or VERY expensive. Remember Zip Disks and floppies? What a laugh!

IDE, Firewire and USB Harddrives have become very affordable so, as I mentioned above, this is a road I have followed as recently as the past year or so. Traditional IDE hardrives of very good quality can be bought very cheaply and the prices seem to continue to drop. Cases and USB/Firewire interfaces amke these drives removable and portable. These drives are fast. May be time to buy some new hardware.

I welcome feedback about all this so, for now, I am going to leave comments open for this post, something I rarely do, as I just dont have time (you see me trying to buy just a little time doing backups here don’cha?) to put into housecleaning blog spam. Akismet, do your thing! We’ll see how it goes…

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updates:
• 4/21/2008 update | added map / feeds / general cleanup | previous timestamp: March 5, 2008 at 8:13 pm
• Note: Post updated Sat March 5th, 2008.
• Note: Post updated Sat Feb 17th, 2007.

© 2008, nyc.locationscout.us. All rights reserved.

]]> http://rrhobbs.com/online-file-storage-for-location-scouts/feed/ 1 40.8637145 -74.163174 http://rrhobbs.com/period-features/ http://rrhobbs.com/period-features/#comments Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:52:22 +0000 R. Richard Hobbs http://rrhobbs.com/period-features/ Continue reading →]]> Period Features Newsletter | …via rrhobbs.com

“Period Features is a small company based in the attractive market town of Leek, on the edge of the Peak District . We aim to be an outstanding source of products for period homes, and to always provide excellent, friendly service.”

I found a trackback on rrhobbs.com and asked myself, “what in the world would a period furnishings shop in England have to do with a location scouting website like mine?”

So I followed their link to their newsletter to the “Enquire Within” column – which contains an article with tips for owners of period homes to use getting their homes used by location scouts and production companies:

“Have you ever wondered what it takes to get your home featured in magazine advertisements and as a TV and film location?”

… read the rest …

The article lists my Information for Property Owners article from my FAQS as well as links to several other websites with links for listing properties for use as film, photo, video / tv or event locations:

• Shoot Factory (UK) | Location Company
• Historic House Assn Film LocationsHistoric Houses Association (UK) | Film locations
• The Spacemen (UK) | Film / Photo Location Company

It’s always fun and interesting (and often useful) to find out about other people, companies and organizations around the world involved in activities the same / similar or otherwise related to what you do



© 2008, nyc.locationscout.us. All rights reserved.

]]> http://rrhobbs.com/period-features/feed/ 0 53.103902 -2.026300 http://rrhobbs.com/any-press-is-good-press/ http://rrhobbs.com/any-press-is-good-press/#comments Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:17:06 +0000 R. Richard Hobbs http://rrhobbs.com/any-press-is-good-press/ Continue reading →]]>
Any press is good press, right? (The San Luis Obispo Tribune) | DUBIOUS HONORS FOR LOCAL LOHAN FLICK | Posted By Sarah Linn | Tue, Jan. 22, 2008

Any press is good press, right? | Will ‘I Know Who Killed Me,’ up for nine shameful Razzies, put a black mark on the county as a filming locale? Promoters don’t seem fazed

“A Lindsay Lohan thriller with a Central Coast connection might have a new claim to fame: 2007’s worst movie…”

“…What’s really important is the experience that the film crew has here before they move on to other projects,” said Jonni Biaggini, Executive Director of the county Visitors & Conference Bureau. “It’s not as critical (that) the film is a box office gangbuster or not.”

…read the rest…

A lot of people (as in, perhaps a property owner or a town government) think that just because a movie might stink at the box office, it might affect their ability to secure future work hosting other shoots (and making money…)

Well, you see, it doesnt work like that – in short, supervision of a script is not the location department’s (the part of a production crew in charge of reccommending locations to the assistant director, director and executive producer) the only people with any direct responsibility regarding the script are the writer(s), the executive producer, and director, and what they are looking for in a location is its uniqueness and suitability to the task at hand – they could, for the most part, care less where a location might have been used in a production other than their own- it’s just plain a fallacy to think otherwise. Leave critiquing a film to the film critics and gossip magazine writers and the moviegoers who pay (or don’t) to see a film – the script is just not our problem, nor is the quality of same anything most of us have any control over, so stop worrying!

At the end of the day, the adage, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, was never truer – a good experience (i.e. lots of cooperation, hospitality and other experiences leave people with a good taste in their mouths…) had by the crew can go a long way toward successfully marketing a location. The best advertising is word of mouth and if people say good things about you, they and others will be back.

The article above illustrates everything I have said; it details the success of several areas in central coastal California who are experiencing continued success in attracting film production in spite of the fact that a recent winner of many Razzies was filmed in the vicinity.



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]]> http://rrhobbs.com/any-press-is-good-press/feed/ 0 35.285520 -120.662554 http://rrhobbs.com/redrafting-of-nyc-moftb-rules/ http://rrhobbs.com/redrafting-of-nyc-moftb-rules/#comments Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:53:07 +0000 R. Richard Hobbs http://rrhobbs.com/redrafting-of-nyc-moftb-rules/ Continue reading →]]> Lots of changes afoot at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting (MOFTB), begun this past year and likely to continue well into 2008 that involve a rewrite of many rules that include potential easing of some film permit requirements and other changes.

Lots of news about this currently ongoing process can be found elsewhere on the web, including:

MOFTB Website:

“August 3, 2007 – Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting (MOFTB) Commissioner Katherine Oliver today announced that MOFTB will redraft proposed Charter-mandated rules for issuing permits to film or photograph on public property. The revision of the rules will take into account feedback MOFTB has received over the past two months. Public comment, which is scheduled to end today, will be re-opened for another 30-day period after the redrafted rules are published.”

“October 29th, 2007 – Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting (MOFTB) Commissioner Katherine Oliver today announced the release of a newly drafted permit rule proposal, which is available online and published in the City Record. Under the proposed rules, which are designed to codify procedures that have existed in practice since the office was established in 1966, a permit would be required for a shoot if production equipment or vehicles create an obstruction, but not for productions that only use hand-held cameras or tripods that don’t cause an obstruction. The publication of the new rules, which are subject to public comment, follows the MOFTB’s decision to redraft rules following an initial publication and comment period that was extended to August 3, 2007. A copy of the proposed rule and an accompanying executive summary and Q&A document explaining it are available on the MOFTB website at www.nyc.gov/film.”

Elsewhere:

• Privacy Digest | August 4th, 2007 | NYC’s MOFTB redrafting proposed Charter-mandated rules for issuing permits to film or photograph on public property
• New York Times | October 28th, 2007 | Mayor to Ease Permit Rules for Capturing City’s Image …via Picture New York
• Gothamist | October 28th, 2007 | New York Photo-Friendly Again
• Google search terms such as “MOFTB” or “MOFTB permit” for further news and discussion if this is a subject you are interested in.

-RH



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© 2007 – 2008, nyc.locationscout.us. All rights reserved.

]]> http://rrhobbs.com/redrafting-of-nyc-moftb-rules/feed/ 0 40.763694 -73.982781 http://rrhobbs.com/new-york-city-film-office-newsletter/ http://rrhobbs.com/new-york-city-film-office-newsletter/#comments Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:51:23 +0000 R. Richard Hobbs http://rrhobbs.com/?p=97 Continue reading →]]> The New York City Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcast (MOFTB) publishes a monthly newsletter which features news about the film office as well as other news of interest to the film and tv production communities.

I particularly like the regular Location of the Month section of each month’s newsletter, in which a city-owned property (such as perhaps a building) or park or New York City neighborhood which may be available as a filming location is highlighted.

The City of New York makes many properties available for filming at no or nominal cost in the interest of promoting filmmaking and economic development for the city.

Use of the various properties is often directly administrated through specific city government agencies depending on the property(s) in question, however, the film office can be quite helpful in directing filmmakers to the appropriate agency.

The current newsletter may be read online by following the link above; free subscriptions via email are offered as well.

• Other MOFTB news / multimedia items are available here.
• …other content about MOFTB on nyc.locationscout.us…


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]]> http://rrhobbs.com/new-york-city-film-office-newsletter/feed/ 0 40.763694 -73.982781 http://rrhobbs.com/for-sopranos-fans/ http://rrhobbs.com/for-sopranos-fans/#comments Wed, 10 Oct 2007 14:18:55 +0000 R. Richard Hobbs http://rrhobbs.com/for-sopranos-fans/ Continue reading →]]> If you were (are?) a fan of the Sopranos (like me!), you might be very interested in this website (The Sopranos on Location) I found which has a theme based on the locations used for filming the aforementioned long-running and award-winning cable-tv series which aired new episodes beginning 1999 till June 2007.

I always liked the show personally and altho I never had the opportunity to work on the show (somebody on their production team called once but the call was interrupted and whatever was to be discussed between us never happened…) the show was always of interest to me professionally (as a location scout), as the majority of their filming locations over the years were in the New York City – northern New Jersey area, often just minutes from my office and places I drive past on a regular basis.

The Sopranos on Location website includes many production photos describing many of the local locations used for filming the show as well as various stories by property owners and fans of the show regarding their encounters with the production.



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