Show HN: Shape-powered movie search | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Shape-powered movie search

croovies.com

26 pointsbgnm200030 comments

For a moment I thought this was a literal search for shapes in movies e.g. search for a blue face and get Avatar, Braveheart etc.

I thought it was going to let you search for the shape of a story http://visual.ly/kurt-vonnegut-shapes-stories-0

That would be pretty freaking funny.

Maxing all axes and not getting The Big Lebowski? Oh, but it seems to be missing from the database entirely. I don't know which is the bigger problem.

Our DB is still growing - but more importantly, a full max shape will be unlikely to yield results - as a perfect average is also unlikely. Movies only appear when their dimension is equal to or greater than the shape you search by.

I was just joking, of course, but it is my favorite movie of all time, and it does rank very highly on all dimensions IMO :) Anyway, nice project. What are you using for auto-completion?

Thanks! All search is using solr w/ sunspot - https://github.com/sunspot/sunspot which has edge matching :)

http://www.croovies.com/movies/685

I'm curious, what did you do to try to find it?

look for it by name. it might have been added in the few hours since I wrote that.

Hmm...that's interesting, it should've definitely already been there. On what page did you search for it?

I've found a movie that caught my attention, but I couldn't find any link to the imdb page - I wanted to read more about it, so I decided to select the title c/p and Google it - but what do you know, you can't select text.

Please fix this.

Sorry about this! Will be fixed tonight

Adding links to IMDB is a good idea. It shall be done!

Pretty cool idea, but I haven't seen enough of these movies to know how well it's working though.

One problem I kept having is that the focus would get stuck in a different point than the one I'm trying to move. Sometimes the focus would be on a point that wasn't even the last point I moved.

I don't think it works well. It has Erroll Flynn's Robin Hood as very rewatchable (I liked it but it's not that rewatchable). Also Seven Samurai and Monty Python's Holy Grail as having very low rewatchability... as if.

Right now the results are based on ratings - so we only have a couple hundred users - all of which have not rated every movie. This is mostly a proof of concept until the rating counts grow.

Idea seems cool. I have two concerns. One I feel this de-focuses me.

Few questions:

How many movies list do you have? I mean this will able to let me know that there are few movies which this site might not be showing.

Right now we have around 30K movies, but will hopefully growing to 100K+ in the next few days.

You manually add them or you use some api?

And how do you rate a movie in different corners of the shape?

We use the free TMDB API. I'm not sure I understand what you're about how to rate a movie? The full shape is a perfect movie, and an empty shape would be a terrible movie.

It returns movies that have the same or greater levels as the ones you chose. So if you pick a minimum level, it will just ignore that axis.

Thanks! I'm just wondering, what do you mean by de-focuses?

I like the idea but I'm not sure about the axes. When would I want a film that:

* isn't enjoyable

* is unoriginal

* I wouldn't want to watch it more than once

* has poor characters

* no story

Splits between serious / silly, or sad/happy might make more sense.

I think it's more about priority. You might want to see a Romeo & Juliet movie with good characters even if it's not original. Lots of mystery movies have surprise endings and aren't rewatchable. You might feel interested in a super-original movie even if it's not very enjoyable.

This is exactly right - we like movies for different reasons, and pick things to watch based on those contexts - so thats what shape search focuses on.

I think this is more just about the wording, but a choice of "enjoyable or not" doesn't make much sense to me. If I'm after something really original, I'll enjoy it because it's original. I "enjoy" watching sad documentaries. A split between enjoyable or not is equivalent to "do you want a film you will like" to me. The converse of most of the options seem like universally negative ways of describing a film. Changing enjoyable to fun would make more sense to me, I'm definitely sometimes in the mood for fun films and other times in the mood for serious films. I may also choose between simple and complex films, for example.

To be more constructive, to emphasise the tradeoffs, perhaps you can't have everything maxed out? Force more of a decision between things.

This is really cool! Is there a way to do this for recent movies as well? (with number of years also being an axis)

Thanks! In the search by shape you should be able to set a time-range, but we wouldn't make an axis for it in the shape itself as it probably wouldn't impact the experience of the movie on universal / timeless scale.

Why is text selection disabled? :(

movieo.me is similar but just without shapes but equally good

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