Show HN: Shape-powered movie search

http://www.croovies.com/movies?signup=hackernews

by bgnm2000 • 11 years ago

26 30 11 years ago

hanniabu• 11 years ago

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.

sp3324• 11 years ago

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.

bgnm20008• 11 years ago

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.

techaddict0092• 11 years ago

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.

bgnm20008• 11 years ago

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

techaddict0092• 11 years ago

You manually add them or you use some api?

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

svinka_beppo5• 11 years ago

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

deluvas• 11 years ago

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.

bgnm20008• 11 years ago

Sorry about this! Will be fixed tonight

svinka_beppo5• 11 years ago

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

dvirsky3• 11 years ago

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.

bgnm20008• 11 years ago

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.

dvirsky3• 11 years ago

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?

svinka_beppo5• 11 years ago

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

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

dvirsky3• 11 years ago

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

arethuza• 11 years ago

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.

sp3324• 11 years ago

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

svinka_beppo5• 11 years ago

That would be pretty freaking funny.

IanCal2• 11 years ago

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.

sp3324• 11 years ago

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.

bgnm20008• 11 years ago

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.

uberneo• 11 years ago

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

ychandler• 11 years ago

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

bgnm20008• 11 years ago

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.

superasn• 11 years ago

Why is text selection disabled? :(

Show HN: Shape-powered movie search

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