English > Feature Suggestions

Long lists of tags in a skin

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Hyomil:
Maybe the tags could work like the list of Actors above it--when there's an actor you want to make note of, you click on them and they're set to 'Always show' in People view. (You could CTRL+click on a tag to get to Tag view instead of displaying all the movies with that tag.)   Thereafter, the actor's name is colored orange in Movies view.  There could be a Tag view as well, with the tags colored orange in similar fashion.

In such a Tag view, you might not want to automatically download all movies on IMDb that have that particular tag, as it might grow your database too much, but you could scrape data from the IMDb Wikia http://imdb.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page to automatically get descriptions/definitions of the tags.  Many tags are ambiguous or have a more extensive or specific meaning than would first appear.  On AniDB http://www.anidb.net, you get descriptions of a movie's tags just by hovering over them.

Actors have their 'Alternative Names' field and tags could as well (ex. cop, motorcycle cop, undercover cop, undercover agent, undercover operative, female undercover, detective, policeman, policewoman, police officer) and they could be linkified if they already existed in your tag database.  If the tags were grouped together in this way, then you could quickly do an Advanced Search for all of them without having to remember all the alternative names.  They could even have pictures. (ex. Using a picture of the first movie where you encountered a tag and became interested in using it.)

rick.ca:
Any information that is to handled in the relational way movies and people are requires a fundamental change to the structure of the database and how the program functions. There would not only have to be a compelling need for such a change, there would also have to be a reliable and comprehensive source for the information. That includes not just the information about the tags, but the relationship of the tags to movies (e.g., IMDb not only has information about people and movies, but also reliable data about people-movie relations). It's not worthwhile providing for relational data solely on the basis some users may want to try to record it on their own.

Having said that, the idea is interesting to ponder. Consider this: Who cares about producers? Perhaps the role meant something is the past, but now it seems everyone's a producer—and they're just cluttering-up my database! If I chose to stop tracking them, what might I use the field for? I suppose I could use it for anything, including things that are not people. In other words, there's nothing stopping me from using Producers to record some sort of tag. In the "people" record for each tag, I could record information about the tag. I'll have to do so using the standard people fields, but that's okay. Translated name, AKA, URL and Comments might be directly applicable. Biography and dates might take on slightly different meanings. The program would automatically maintain a tag filmography. 8)

Where would I get the data? I suppose I could ask nostra to provide for an IMDb plugin option to write some other tag to Producers, but he'd probably just think I was off my medication again. No matter. I actually prefer some of the Allmovie tags (Genres, Types, Themes), and I can modify my Allmovie script to put one of those into Producers (and, of course, I'll stop downloading producers from IMDb). For the tags I'm thinking of, Allmovie has a short commentary (a "Biography"!) and list of top movies (Comments) for most of them. This information would have to be recorded manually (i.e., by cut & paste), so I might what to choose one that doesn't have a huge number of values. Or maybe someone who likes this idea will write a script for me... ;)

mgpw4me@yahoo.com:
IMDB has a published list of keywords, so all we have to do is relate them in logical groups: http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Keywords/   :o

Any volunteers?

Hyomil:
Its hard to know what to do with IMDb’s plot keywords.  There was once a site, now down, that would do statistics that showed which keywords showed up most frequently in movies you rated highly.  If the plot keyword “water bottle” shows up as occuring frequently, does this mean you should start looking for movies tagged “water bottle” because you have some subconscious attraction to them?   Hard to believe its not a conincidence and hard to be motivated to add “water bottle” to a movie’s tags every time you come across one.  Of course, users have started using the system to add genre or theme keywords or things like "scene during end credits", but mostly you get long lists of things like "door knob," "oven mitt," "rice cooker," etc.

Ordinary things do take on some special meaning in the context of a film and plot keywords are a way to remember some cool moment in the film (If you could associate it with a screenshot, that would be better).  Maybe if there was some data mining done, you could find a correlation where the kinds of movies you like tend to feature similar plot elements (ex.  Dynamite, smoke, elevators, keyholes), but it seems like it would mostly be weak correlations, even with the more descriptive plot keywords like “door kicked in” or “light shot out.” 

Initially, I was very excited about plot keywords in PVD as a movie discovery tool, but it seems now more intended as a memory trigger and going through long lists of tags of even my favorite movies is a bit of a headscratching experience.  It seems like only a site like Jinni.com could really make good use of them to assist in movie recommendations.  I do use the 'IMDb Movie Collection Mananger - by Futuros' Greasemonkey script so I can peruse IMDb's MoKA (Movie Keywords Analyzer) for movies I haven't seen; I just don't have much confidence in it.

Allmovie is interesting with its distinction between Genres, Types, Themes, Moods, and Tones, but it has a limited database (Only two and a half pages of results for “Romantic Comedy” Type, two pages of results for “Romantic Drama” Type, one page of results for “Action Thriller” Type, etc.)  Same problem with Jinni.com.

rick.ca:

--- Quote ---Its hard to know what to do with IMDb’s plot keywords.
--- End quote ---

I've always considered them completely useless—in the context of my personal database—for the reasons you describe. They're fine when used in a tool like MoKA, where they can easily be added/excluded on-the-fly along with other criteria.

BTW, just to make sure we're not confusing anyone... There is no "keyword" field in PVD. I believe IMDb keywords are downloaded to Tags.

I prefer Allmovie "Keywords" and "Tones", which I download to a custom field named Keywords and Tags respectively. Allmovie keywords seem to reflect some measure of editorial control—they seem less far-flung and more relevant to the movies to which they're applied. Even so, I don't find them of much use. "Tones" are something entirely different—more like Genre in that there are not a huge number of them, each has a specific meaning and they're consistently applied. I like them because they accurately describe the mood of a movie.


--- Quote ---Ordinary things do take on some special meaning in the context of a film and plot keywords...
--- End quote ---

Agreed, but again, I don't believe the data (especially the correlation to specific scenes) exists. If one were serious about this sort of thing, I think the way to do it would be to collect movie scripts (also easier said than done). Since PVD doesn't do search summaries or show where hits are within a field, they would best be saved outside the database. There, a Windows or other search tool could be used and the hits associated to the movies via the file names (i.e., the scripts would be named something like [Title] ([Year]) Script.doc). I'm doing this now with subtitles (because they're readily available for all movies), but, of course, they include only dialog—and not even who spoke the words. They do, however, include time codes which would allow the exact spot in the movie to be found.

So here's another wacky feature suggestion: Find the given search term in the subtitle files located beside the currently displayed movies. Launch the screenshot maker and grab X shots from the time interval from the end of the previous dialog to the start of the next. Tag the screenshots (another new feature) with "[hh:mm:ss] [search term]" and save them in their respective movie records.


--- Quote ---Initially, I was very excited about plot keywords in PVD as a movie discovery tool...
--- End quote ---

Just because it's the best movie database software on the planet doesn't mean it should be used for everything. MoKA seems to work reasonably well, especially when My Movies and the "Movie Collection Manager" Greasemonkey script are used. Jinnie also looks very interesting. I wish there was a way to upload movies and ratings to sites like this. I use Web search to integrate PVD with sites like this (I haven't yet figured out how to do so for Jinni).

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