Ordering movie credits with graph theory
endcrawl.com
endcrawl.com
(1) Whose name comes up first when the credits roll matters in some way. Presumably people feel slighted if they don't have the right amount of prominence or something like that.
(2) Apparently, despite this being important enough to worry about, and even though there are standardized titles, and even though people have been making movies for well over 100 years, there isn't a consensus or standardized order. Seemingly every film just sort of does something they feel is appropriate.
(3) It must be a fair assumption that people who arrange credits do it with purpose, so that if you look at the order they chose, it tells you something meaningful about what the right order is.
(4) The goal, then, is to basically computationally reverse engineer what order people have in mind when they put credits on film and produce an ordering that reflects actual practice as accurately as possible.
(5) This is a messy process because the data is inconsistent and contradictory, so it is fertile ground for creatively applying algorithms to tease out the meaningful parts.
(2) commonly, once the leads or "above the fold" credits, they list by department with leads listed first, then plebes last. Look at all of the 3D artists. Just a list of names. Above them, are the project managers, above them are directors, producers, etc.
*all of the above comes from personal involvement. sometimes asking a direct question of "what goes first" is responded with "I'll get back to you", but never does. "Just do what everyone else does" is common response too.
you have to remember that the person doing the credits is pretty much the lowest of jobs. nobody wants to do this job, and it is often assigned to intern level assignments. "take this Word Doc/Excel/.txt, and turn it into a graphic". Every post house I've worked in has always cried "there must be a better way".
If that is the case, then the perception that one is a "star" or whatever, with credit order, mind correlate with future success. Of course, that correlation might be independent of credit-order placement (such as the actor is actually better in the movie and would be perceived as such even without credit order placement).
The solution was to have Shelley Long on the upper right of the first screen with names and to have Ted Danson on the lower left of that screen. The credits were the consecutive screen type, not the long scroll type, so the two names appeared at the same time.
Long would be read first by someone who read down, and Danson would be read first by someone going left to right. The producers were able to convince both Long and Danson that they were not second.
The rest of the main cast each got a screen afterwards with just their name on it.
Here's the credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS0VQOHX7lM
When Long left and Kirstie Alley joined the cast as the new female lead and there was now no question than Danson was the star of the show there were no more special screens. Each main cast member got their own screen, with Danson's being the first shown.
Here's that version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGdpE8Dsr0U
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DiagonalBilling
Goes back to at least 1941, according to that page
1. Above-the-Line credits (cast, director, producer, other key roles) are contractually negotiated, and a mistake here has definite consequences. That isn't usually the case for all the remaining credits. But people still care that the ordering makes sense and flows well. Chronology, prestige, authorship, and org chart level are all axes you could order on -- but that's already too many ways to reconcile.
2. One of the challenges with standardizing credits order is that roles come and go all the time. I mentioned this in the post, but 18 months ago there was no "COVID Compliance Officer" in end credits. Now it's in nearly all feature films, and we know where it goes. HN might also find it interesting that roles like "Data Center Engineering" and "Deployment Services" have started showing up just in the last few years.
Maybe these same folks can add a progress bar to end credits across major films ;)
Shaking out a fairly optimal list that jibes with the instincts of people who have read a lot of credits has its uses, though; it feels like a good starting point from which to deal with the fact that this production had some incredible demands put on the Balloon Tech, and that the Basecamp Electrician's father is one of the studio executives and cut a deal to have their kid's name higher up in exchange for greenlighting the show. Or whatever.
Probably not. They do credits for movies of all sizes. If you're doing a small student film, do you really want to think about the order of your credits? This gives you a great default choice.
On the frontpage of Endcrawl, the company behind this blog post:
> Ace your end credits and de-stress post production with the solution used by over 2,000 films and series.
Having a standard template seems like a way to easily "de-stress post production", and maybe even "ace your end credits". If this actually becomes an industry standard, the company behind it would also get some publicity. I've personally never even thought about how credits were made, and never knew that there were companies focused on just this point. Now I know that Endcrawl exist, and have a positive opinion of them because they wrote an intersting blog post, that could be used as a reference for other ordering problems. They're also trading this standard template for your email address: https://endcrawl.com/template/
Does anyone know of a resource where you can search for peoples' names that appear in any movie/tv credits? The list of credits can be massive, and I don't think sites like IMDb are trying to create archival coverage at that level of detail.
Whatever movie did it, it makes me wonder if the screen could simply be split in two, with major credits scrolling upwards on the left half and more minor roles scrolling downwards on the right half, perhaps at a different speed. Major stars, directors, producers, etc. would still get their full screen credits before the scrolling started. Deciding who ends up on with side of the screen would of course be another complication.
Just an example to explain what I mean. The film Bard Wire has an alphabetical cast list (so Pamela Anderson Lee, as she went by at the time, is mid way down the credits). Interestingly the "three actors" listed by IMDb has Anderson first, but then the next two are just the top two on the credits. It would be useful, to a degree, to try and figure out who those second and third people should be based on some metric.
This is in the first season.
The description of the cost function seems strange, since it's described in terms of the distance from "the correct order". It's clear that there is no single correct order. If two movies disagree on the ordering, it is not necessarily the case that one of them is doing it "wrong".
Mathematically, it seems like it would be better to see any given movie's ordering as a sample from a statistical distribution. That suggests that computing cost in confidence terms, as in the probability of generating that ordering given your assumed distribution, might make more semantic sense. So for example you could maybe use the frequency graphs from the article and sum up the surprise of each path from the first to last entry in your list. (Where "surprise" here is the inverse of how frequently one node follows another.) That's linear. Or you could do it quadratically by making a matrix of A-follows-B frequencies and then summing up all pairs of entries in your list (normalizing by the length of the list). The latter takes more of the graph structure into account.
Which is also the other thing that seemed a bit odd -- it seems like the "A follows B" relationship is getting a little mixed up with "A immediately follows B". As in, clumping the generator-related roles together isn't the same thing as saying an intern should follow a principal, and the cost function shouldn't treat those constraints the same way. I don't know how much noise it introduces, but intuitively it seems like the algorithm probably ought to do an ordering and then a clumping. Or perhaps the opposite: do ordering within clumps ("everything with 'generator' in the name"), then treat the clump as a single component for the main ordering pass.
The last thing is that the article seems to take NP-hardness too seriously. Sure, if you really had to consider every possible permutation, it would take too long. But there's way more than enough structure in the problem to take advantage of. Some very very conservative heuristics would surely dramatically reduce the size of the relevant N that participates in the core NP-hard problem. Your Traveling Salesman may have to visit 50 cities in each of Oregon and New York, but you know there's no point in making him fly back and forth between the states more than the minimally required (2). Write your algorithms in such a way that you don't need to even allow the possibility of putting the Gaffer behind the Intern Electrician's Boyfriend's Dog.
(Author here.) Indeed! This is about trying to discover emergent conventions, so we can give first-time filmmakers a good starting point.
Or you could do it quadratically by making a matrix of A-follows-B frequencies and then summing up all pairs of entries in your list (normalizing by the length of the list). The latter takes more of the graph structure into account.
This is what PageRank (Experiment 3) does!
The last thing is that the article seems to take NP-hardness too seriously. Sure, if you really had to consider every possible permutation, it would take too long. But there's way more than enough structure in the problem to take advantage of.
I ask this question in a footnote [0] -- is this permutation space amenable to gradient descent? Don't know the answer! If someone knows this area well I'm all ears.
[0] https://endcrawl.com/credits-ordering/#fn:permutation-search
You missed one very interesting angle for the problem (speaking of games), namely Voting theory, which is an important part of game theory!
In voting theory, there is a concept called Kemeny ranking (Kemeny–Young method), which I believe is exactly what you are looking for. It is of course an NP-hard problem, but that shouldn't scare you away.
In a voting setting, each movie would "vote" for a ranking of, say, the electric unit; i.e., the gaffer comes before the other people. When you have many movies, you have many votes that you want to combine in order to rank all the candidates, while minimizing inconsistencies. A seminal paper was published in the journal of the ACM, Aggregating inconsistent information: Ranking and clustering by Ailon, Charikar, and Newman.
An important insight is that your directed graph is actually what we call a tournament; for every two vertices a and b, there is an edge either from a to b, or from b to a.
In that case, you want to solve a well known and widely studied problem, namely Feedback Arc Set in Tournaments (FAST). Check out the paper in ISAAC by Karpinski and Schudy, Faster algorithms for feedback arc set tournament, Kemeny rank aggregation and betweenness tournament (it's on arxiv).
Is it stealing the scroll bar for anyone else? I literally can’t tell where I am in the article and have to scroll with my mouse wheel. Wat?
Also interested why they went with Trueskill over Glicko 2, since it's just 1v1 'encounters' anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billing_(performing_arts)#Top_...
Look at the poster for "The Towering Inferno". Steve McQueen's name is left-most while Paul Newman's name is the highest. William Holden is lower than both of them and to the right, lining up with McQueen's last name. And Faye Dunaway is about half an line lower than Holden's last name.
Then there's fights about how big someone's name/picture can be in relation to others.
Look at the live action Beauty and the Beast Poster. Emma Watson gets a lot of poster estate and first billing. Then it gets a bit crazy. Not to mention, how people are billed is a bit contentious as well. You'll notice that it's mostly a list of names except the final two. "with Ian McKellen and Emma Thompson". That's because being a special mention is worth something. It's a way to give prominence to non-leading actors who are significant in other ways.
The Thor movies do this with Anthony Hopkins. Clearly he's not the lead, but dude has had a career and he was a big get for the movies. For Ragnarok, they even toss it to Mark Ruffalo, probably as a way to acknowledge his part's significance in the film.
Spider-man: Homecoming is another interesting one to look at as well as it gives a lot of real estate to Robert Downey Jr. Tom Holland has a smaller picture than the Spider-man suit, while Robert Downey Jr. is much larger than the Iron Man suit. Michael Keaton also gets the double up, but both of his images are much smaller.
A lot of the Marvel posters are good to look at to see the politicking that goes on as they do a lot of ensemble movies.
And then there's also the fact that sometimes the pictures are made before the credits are put on it. So you're locked in an image but contracts dictate name order.