Show HN: CinemaBuff - Actor graphs using IMDB ratings | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CinemaBuff - Actor graphs using IMDB ratings

cinemabuff.net

40 pointsdl837 comments

Shameless Plug: If you enjoy CinemaBuff, you might also want to check out my startup's movie section: http://iknow.io/browse/movies-1/

We offer fairly advanced movie data analysis capabilities, using data from Freebase, Rotten Tomatoes and The-numbers.com.

You can do stuff like this: http://iknow.io/insight/christopher-nolans-movies-are-gettin...

And a lot more. We'd love feedback on how we can improve if you have any, thanks!

Very awesome

Thanks!

Clicking around a bit I think the only conclusion I draw is that variability from one movie to the next is much greater than any overall trend of an actor's career.

My favorite so far is Samuel L. Jackson

Highest rated film: Pulp Fiction (1994) - 9.0 Lowest rated film: Hail Caesar (1994)- 2.9

and sometimes actors will take movies where they love the part knowing full well the chances of the movie making it big are nil.

Very cool. I did a similar thing a while back using the IMDB data files. It has a few views.

Director ranking http://godsofluxury.com:5001/

Director detail http://godsofluxury.com:5001/person/263239 http://godsofluxury.com:5001/person/56779

TV show by seasons http://godsofluxury.com:5001/tvshow/191909

Hopefully that can give you some inspiration.

Yeah I was planning to add very similar pages to those once I've cleaned up my data. How did you do the popularity rankings, or were those somehow included in IMDB's data dump and I overlooked?

Or is that just a total # of votes for each movie combined?

I did a something similar that allows you to search for and graph IMDb TV show ratings.

http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com

This is cool. I was hoping to write something to look at movies differently (just something to get me working on something). I didn't even know IMDB let you get data.

I don't know if it's possible but can you break games, shows, movies, etc out? Video games got shown next to movies (and probably shows). I would like to know if some actor does great on tv but flops games/movies etc. That and the random kept giving me foreign actors. I suppose that means it really is random...would be cool to see random by language or something.

Yeah absolutely, I initially want to start it small and slowly expand it to encompass a lot of those things with a variety of features.

When I initially had the random actor, a vast majority of the time I would land up on someone who only had 1 movie, so basically a dot on the graph, so I restricted the eligibility of the random page for the actor to have at least 3 films under their belt.

The thing with literal data, is that you don't get a comprehensive look on their "best" work. For example, Tom Hanks. As a cinema buff, an actor's work isn't rated based on his highest and lowest rating. http://i.imgur.com/MnVFiWF.png?1

I wouldn't show the highest and lowest rated film, but rank on awards and successful ($) hits. Also, showing an "average" is good, but can really hinder a true value.

Nice man I like the idea, its loading a bit slow for me just now but I recon that's cause its reached front page.

I'm working on something using IMDB information as well right now, hope you done mind If I share it. It's getting an overhaul right now and more features are being implemented as we speak.

http://filmfortonight.com/

My wife and I constantly have this problem. Glad someone's trying to solve it. I wasn't able to make use of the site on my mobile device though.

Yeah I'm sorry about that once the main website is finished a mobile app will be getting build. Sorry :(

Nice, simple and fun.

There's a bug in an error message in the 'Compare' feature. If it can't find one of the two actors, it always says it can't find the first one.

e.g. http://www.cinemabuff.net/comparison/?q1=Sam+Rockwell&q2=Jon...

Thanks, will fix it tonight.

Nicholas Cage has a shockingly even range...

Fun. Fell a little flat when I found movies like "Craptastic" for Clint Eastwood, which he wasn't really involved with. Does the data dump have categories so you can restrict the list more appropriately?

Yes, I'm currently working on that. I think I may be able to restrict a lot of the unwanted movies by filtering based on the number of votes.

It's now fixed.

Awesome, much better!

Application Error An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

Why is it that some movies are missing from the results? For example, when I searched "Daniel Day-Lewis", the movie "The Last of The Mohicans" was missing.

I'm not sure, I'll look into it. I know I excluded many of the "Behind the Scenes" and "Making of" movies, but I'm not sure why legit ones are missing, thank you for reporting that specific example so I trace the problem.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon

Didn't RottenTomatoes have this kind of feature back in the days? I remember being bit annoyed when they removed it.

Neat! Where did you get the data?

IMDb has a data dump: http://www.imdb.com/interfaces

It's kinda a mess to parse through it and get the data in though.

That data dump is a mess! I used it for my soundtrack project: http://thesoundtrackdb.com

Definitely. I only parsed through the names, ratings, and years. Going back to parse more stuff such as the number of votes, genre, etc. is going to be the most painful part of this project.

Cool project! By the way, small correction: It should be courtesy, not couretsy.

Whoa, I never knew imdb put their file as a dump. I've always tried to go through freebase

Every actor I search for right now returns a "Not Found" message.

It should be working again in a minute or two, sorry for the inconvenience.

Really nice idea mate, well done.

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