

Show HN: Shape-powered movie search - bgnm2000
http://www.croovies.com/movies?signup=hackernews

======
arethuza
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.

~~~
sp332
I thought it was going to let you search for the shape of a story
[http://visual.ly/kurt-vonnegut-shapes-stories-0](http://visual.ly/kurt-
vonnegut-shapes-stories-0)

------
dvirsky
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.

~~~
bgnm2000
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.

~~~
dvirsky
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?

~~~
bgnm2000
Thanks! All search is using solr w/ sunspot -
[https://github.com/sunspot/sunspot](https://github.com/sunspot/sunspot) which
has edge matching :)

------
deluvas
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.

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

------
hanniabu
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.

~~~
sp332
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.

~~~
bgnm2000
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.

------
techaddict009
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.

~~~
bgnm2000
Right now we have around 30K movies, but will hopefully growing to 100K+ in
the next few days.

~~~
techaddict009
You manually add them or you use some api?

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

~~~
bgnm2000
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.

------
IanCal
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.

~~~
sp332
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.

~~~
bgnm2000
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.

~~~
IanCal
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.

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

~~~
bgnm2000
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
Why is text selection disabled? :(

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

