Hello, this is Izumitani from Ehime Film Commission.
Every film commission has its essential sales toolkit — the Location Guide and the Shooting Guide. The Location Guide is a curated collection of potential filming sites, while the Shooting Guide is a practical field reference packed with useful information and key contacts.
Both need to be updated regularly, as the information grows stale over time. In the past, we produced large, encyclopedic Location Guides — thick, beautifully photographed books. Over time, however, the industry shifted toward lighter, leaner formats: something that sparks curiosity and opens the door to a conversation rather than exhaustively documenting every detail.
A Location Guide is not something you’d find in a bookstore, hand to a passerby, or sell at a shop. It’s created exclusively for film and media professionals, so the content is quite different from a standard tourism brochure.
Pages are organized by category — ocean, mountains and flowers, architecture, train stations, shrines and temples, everyday life and townscapes, historic buildings, local food and specialty products, and more. Alongside suggested locations, we also include the kind of practical details that production crews frequently ask about: parking capacity, restroom availability, and distance from Matsuyama Airport.
We also include information that never appears in a tourism guide — local police station contacts and the designated filming liaison offices for each municipality. Shooting in parks or on public roads requires a Road Use Permit and municipal approval. By including all the necessary administrative information in one place, this guide gives production teams a solid foundation to get the conversation going right away.
The latest edition was completed in January 2026 and made its debut at the National Location Fair. The response was immediate. Industry professionals picked it up, flipped through the pages, and before long, copies were walking out the door one by one — “This is great, can I take one?” Other film commissions took notice too, stopping by to say, “We should really make one of these. This is great reference material for our next edition.”
The key to a great Location Guide is this: it should feel like the beginning of something, not the whole story. It should leave people thinking, “There must be even more great locations out there” — because there are. Tourism destinations have their place, but the real magic is in images that spark a director’s imagination.
Just recently, we received an inquiry that began with: “I’ve been looking through the Location Guide you gave me…”
The Ehime Location Guide is already doing its job. Here’s hoping it leads to the next great production!