Discussions on Film
Genre
I just added "Genre" as a film property. Some of the Genres are a little silly, but I'll leave them all in for now, and clean them up as we go.
I'm tagging westerns today. Is the term "tagging" okay to describe adding the genre property to films? When I think of tagging it makes me want to add more terms like, frontier, cavalry, cowboys and indians, pioneers, mexican border, settlement. But those terms create a lot of noise for genre. Will there be a way to do sloppy tagging like delicious and other folksonomies?
It may help make films easier to query by genre if there are fewer genres overall. If a genre is very obscure, it's unlikely that other people are going to add it to films, so coverage is bad and therefore the genre isn't that useful.
Sloppy tagging and folksonomies make sense, but they wouldn't be as specific as film genre in this case. This sounds a lot like the "related topics" property we once had on the Topic (originally Concept) type. We could easily bring that back if people would find it useful.
I think the genre section here illustrates problems that are likely to occur in data models developed by communities whose members are working in isolation. It's much easier to create quality Wikipedia content, I think, than to create quality controlled vocabularies on a community site. Genre is admittedly one of the most subjective metadata topics I've ever come across. I have more genre lists than I have socks. However, a brief glance at this list reveals:
Action/Drama/Thriller -- as well as "Action," "Drama," and "Thriller" as individual categories.
"Short Subject" is generally thought of as a format, not a genre.
I think "Cult" appears on the list three times. "Crime" is on there a couple times. Are these intended to represent slightly different semantics on the same term, or is there no redundancy checking on the type name?
I disagree with your definition of "Documentary." The first films weren't intended to describe a subject, they were really just intended to show the audience a moving image -- that was enough of a thrill at the time. The Library of Congress calls these "Actuality" films. "Reality" is of course a different genre. Who's right or who's wrong is not the problem. If I add "Actuality" to your list, it will conflict with your definition of Documentary. And then it does seem that your data is sloppy and contradicts itself. What's the Metaweb position on this problem? I only see it getting worse as there are more users.
How about "Movie Studio"?
If we were to add properties on Film, then I would suggest distinguishing the studios where something was filmed from the funder from the distributor.
Film company and movie studio are really generic in this use. At Mystery Movie Studio where I might happen to work, we rent our soundstages to other studios all the time. We do special effects for movies from other studios. We may do sound and post-production for other studios as well. There are production entities, releasing companies, distributors, studios, etc. I think what you're really talking about here is the releasing company, but perhaps I'm splitting the hair too finely for those outside of the industry.
Adapted screenplay vs original screenplay
At this point there seems to be no way to differentiate between the two types. One has to put both the original author and the screenplay author in the same property. Would it be possible to add in something like original author or something to that affect as a property?
Also (this is something quite specific to the Indian film industry aka Bollywood) the music director in Hindi films is usually different from the 'sound directors'. The difference being that the music director sets the music to the songs (which are usually written by somebody else!!). The sound directors usually set the score for the movie (aka background music). Is there any way to represent this information in the current setup?
We could split the 'written by' property into two: "screenplay by" and "story by". The assumption would be that if only the screenplay value existed it would mean that the person in the "screenplay by" property would also be the story writer.
I could make such a change now and we could start teasing apart the property values, so that Shakespeare, for instance, does not appear on the "screenplay by" property (nor does he appear to be a "film writer).
I'm not sure I understand your second idea. I'll talk to you directly.
I just added the "story by" property and renamed "written by" to be "screenplay by". The new "story by" property points to the type "film story contributor".
Please feel free to fix any films where the story contributor should be split out.
I was wondering if screenplay could be a type like book or even a subtype of book (if that's possible). Then we could have properties along the lines of original and adapted, author, adapter (if there's such a word) and some book/printing related properties too. That would also allow us to classify printed and bound screenplays like Pulp Fiction which one can buy at a bookstore. Just my two cents.
Interesting. We could definitely have a screenplay type, which could either be in the film domain or the book domain.
A book is not a screenplay unless the screenplay has been published.
Fixed Film Award and Film Award Nomination types
the award winners/nominees property used to only allow one value. Awards with multiple winners (such as 'best song') can now be added.
Characters and fictional locals
Would it be appropriate to add a couple film types to cover characters/creatures that appear in movies? I just checked Darth Vader and Borat, and they don't really have a type. Also, places that appear in films might have their own type, like Wonka's Chocolate Factory or where have you.
I second that. We have a People domain, perhaps a Fictional Character would be a good type there, with a Source property pointing back to the origin - movie, book, comic strip, myth, etc. As for Fictional Location, I would like to see a similar data model in perhaps the Location domain.
Until then, it may make sense to type topics like Borat as a Person, and Wonka's Chocolate Factory as a Location, so as to impart properties like Birth Place and Country as appropriate.
Could you help me out?
Is there a general forum so that I can figure out what're known issues being worked on, and to otherwise help me out with things I might be missing?
I just created a type, Fictional Character, and I set it to link to Film as 'Appeared In.' But when I add a character to the Fictional Character type it adds Film as one of its types. What's up with that?
Your Fictional Character schema has "Film" as an included type, meaning that every Fictional Character is also a Film. I don't think this is what you intended. I think you'd want to remove Film as an included type from your Fictional Character schema. You could possibly Person as the included type, but that would mean excluding non-human fictional creatures from this type.
Home Video Market: Direct to Video/Direct to DVD & OVA/OAV (Original Video Animation)
There's this ever-growing market of titles made for viewing at home (originally video tape, sometimes on laser disk [Japan's anime mostly did this] and now onto DVD). Most often to be found in the video stores.
Where will this go? Some titles are quite clearly films (poorly made low budget sequels mostly, though Disney made lots of sequels this way for it's main titles in this manner), others are quite clearly episodic scripted shows.
There's a huge market of OVA/OAV titles in Japan for short episode runs of anime that never aired on TV/Satellite/Cable/Theatre. I am at a loss on how to categorize such titles as 'Blue Submarine 6' which is a very influential 6 part anime that was released as an OVA.
Hi Gordon,
Please check out our anime and manga schema currently loaded on the sandbox server -- it may answer some of your questions. It is mostly meant to model anime and manga franchises (like Dragon Ball Z or Cowboy Bebop) but could be extended to cover other OVA releases as well.
http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/domain?id=/anime_manga
Suggestions are welcome!
Colin
I did a quick model of blue submarine 6 on the sandbox:
http://sandbox.freebase.com/view?id=%239202a8c04000641f80000000004f362f
Looks pretty good this anime/manga schema does...I wonder if it is necessary to create an 'anime ova' type though...I am assuming 'anime title' could be any film, OVA, TV series and 'release format' to be media type
So it could be for just in the anime realm of the combined anime/manga:
"Blue Submarine 6" - anime title; and "OVA," "DVD," "Video Tape" - media type
"Patlabor 1" - anime title; "Film," "Laser Disk," "DVD," "Video Tape" - media type
"Ah My Goddess! Series 2" - anime title; "TV Series," "DVD" - media type
Hello Gordon,
Well the current idea is to have anime tile crosstyped as tv, film, or ova. That way you can get all anime from a search for anime title. You also have the added bonus that an anime film is tied to film and an anime tv series is tied to tv, rather than both getting there own weird specialized tv and film types (which would make querying much more difficult)
We have OVA as it's own type mainly to match the infobox on wikipedia (they give it it's own sub-infobox) but also because there are some properties unique to OVAs (or at least OVAs have a lot of things NOT in common with television).
The release format should probably be a compound value type including a format and a date and maybe a region.
If you have any thoughts on any of this, let me know.
Regards,
Reciprocal link for "Film Subject"
Film Subject doesn't have a reciprocal link right now, so even though the RMS titanic is the subject of the movie Titanic, you don't see a link back to the movie. Personally I think this would be a really useful link, and would encourage people to fill out the "Film Subject" property...it's only a single field so it adds minimal clutter to the Film Subject instances on the other end.
Fixed!
Woody Allen example query
The example query in the film help text for "films directed by Woody Allen and starring Diane Keaton" seems broken -- the list it returns includes a lot of non-Allen, non-Keaton flicks.
Thanks for the heads up - fixed.
Film Character?
Hi, may I suggest a Film Character type, similar to the various fictional character types we have, such as Book Character. Currently a Film Performance has Actor and Part, where the expected type for Part is simply text. It would be nice to be able to create a character topic that can be used for all films containing that character, and co-type it for books containing the same character. Thanks.
Features vs Shorts (and Series of each)
Is there any distinction between a feature-length film and a short?
The reason I ask is that I just checked out the "Looney Tunes" entry, and I see that it is set to type "TV Program". This is not correct, it is really a Film Series, but of shorts. Many short films, both live-action and animated, are parts of series.
Is there any reason you wouldn't want to use the 'film' type? Certainly, it seems heavyweight, but you would likely use most of the properties.
Also, if you use the film type, you could use 'film series' in the way it is currently done for feature films.
R
Robert -- yes, using "Film" was my intent, just as you say. I was just checking for any objections first.
Thanks for asking -- I remember when we created the film type I now remember debating if we wanted to have separate types for short films but decided to put it off to see what would happen. It now makes more sense.
Based on a book?
Hi,
I am pretty new to freebase so sorry for asking the obvious. I want to link a film (Dune) to a book (Dune). Is there a way to do this curently. I was kind of thinking that the Film type should have a "Based on book" field. But then I thought that maybe there is a "Based on book" type around since other things could be based on books as well. Any ideas?
Great site by the way. I really enjoy browsing and adding to the content.
Regards,
Fredrik Rubensson
Hi Fredrik,
Welcome to Freebase! What you looking for is the types 'Adaptation' and 'Adapted Work'. You can go to the Movie, click on Types, and add the type Adaption to it. That'll add an 'Adapted From' property field. If you enter the book there, the book will automatically be typed as an Adapted Work, and each will link to the other.
Cheers,
Film character migration
We've completed a migration to a better representation of film performances that replaces "/film/performance/part" (a text string) with "/film/performance/character" (a film character). For now, "part" will stick around for compatibility with existing applications, but we encourage you to make the switch where relevant in your applications as it is now considered deprecated in favor of "character". We've also introduced a distinction between "actors" and "personal appearances", the latter of which should be used for documentary-like appearances (interviews, non-fictional narration, etc.)
New property petition
Hi! I've just created a few types of my own, and I wonder if it could be added as a property of the Film type. The type to be added is called "File collection mediator" (I take suggestions on changing this, I don't like the name). I'll explain to you the types so you understand the idea. First you have the type "File". This type allows you to define the URL or URLs of where the file is hosted, the size, the version and a couple of things more. Then you have the "File collection" which has a description of that collection and a list of files included. So, the idea is to be able to create, for example, a collection of files with: the trailers of a movie, or with pictures of that movie, or another with wallpapers. What do you think?? Thanks!
Interesting idea. We do have a couple of things already that may support part of what you're looking for:
- You can add an image to the film's image gallery
- You can add web links to the film's web links. These links can be named
Why is it that you want to put them into discrete collections? Isn't the property a collection already?
Dub Actor
So I just noticed a Japanese name in the cast for a Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western film which puzzled me until I realized he was used to dub Clint's parts for the Japanese theatrical releases. So I have added the "Seiyu" term to 'Special Performance Type' as the vocals-only performance in Japan of Anime and dubbing of foreign titles is specialized art form unique to Japan. But for dubbing maybe the artists should be listed in its own unique property distinct from Film Performance...Dubbed by? With language sub-property as well.
I just added a type (a CVT/mediator) that represents dubbing performances by actors for the non-original language. It appears as a property on Film now. You can enter the actor, the character and the language used.
http://www.freebase.com/view/schema?id=%2Ffilm%2Fdubbing_performance
http://www.freebase.com/view/schema?id=%2Ffilm%2Ffilm
A new Film property?
We need something like the Book Editions property for the variations in releases that can occur when movies have different running times for the various countries (quite common in the 30's through the 70's for foreign made films when they come to America they get edited down in running time) or when a movie is re-released later on with additional scenes and edits like "Close Encounters of the Third Time."
Hmmm...Runtime has the note property, so I suppose you could add date and country for specific runtimes.
The "film cut" CVT could be expanded. The note was a placeholder for things like "director's cut" or "special edition", which probably could be real topics. An additional property could optionally show the country or region (suggesting a new type 'film region' which could overlay any location.)
Does this sound reasonable?
The "film cut" CVT could be expanded. The note was a placeholder for things like "director's cut" or "special edition", which probably could be real topics. An additional property could optionally show the country or region (suggesting a new type 'film region' which could overlay any location.)
Does this sound reasonable?
I just changed the "film cut" CVT. Tell me what you think. Also -- the region property points to location, not a co-type.
Yes, a classic example of alternate running time versions is the Russian film War & Peace having different running times
Dune with it's many versions on film, tv, with/without David Lynch (Alan Smithee for the unauthorized re-edits).
The Alan Smithee case is why I left the "note" field. If there are other consistent variables aside from cut ('director's cut', 'special edition') and film release region ('Russia', 'Asia'), then we can add that.
One I think might be appropriate is 'release date', which is distinct from the 'initial release date' that's directly on film.
So when is film format going to be made available for films?
I see it exists, but is not currently linked to within film...Is it meant to be a co-type to be applied when desired?
I used it in a demo just yesterday. I guess we would have to be clear about when the film format is used -- for filming? For initial feature presentation? Also, it seems like there are a bunch of digital standards with equivalent semantics. I wonder if there is a larger blanket term that includes both video and film?
Definitely for initial capture...That's what most sites that catalog movies seem to prefer.
Then later on we introduce an editions property maybe, with relevant formats for how it is viewable...35 mm film, digital (whatever formats we ever end up using, seems up in the air as you have mentioned), DVD, laserdisk, 8 mm. Then we'd get into viewing ratios :)
I added a property for film format. Have fun!
Film List
I wanted list the movies to AFI's Top 100 for the last 100 years. However, I need an extension to the Film Collection type. Ideally, Film List would extend Film Collection as an enumerated collection of films with a specific order. I need to state #1 is Citizen Kane for example.
Ordered lists are possible, although the freebase UI currently doesn't show the number. See this help topic:
http://www.freebase.com/view/helptopic?id=%239202a8c04000641f8000000003c1b1cc
Once you set the ordering, they will be ordered by default in any application that uses the collections.
Great. It would be nice to view the numbering along with the value since a movie's ranking is of value.
When an actor plays himself...interesting edge case
When an actor plays himself in a film, the performance entry triggers the actor topic to be co-typed as:
- Film character
- Fictional character
- Film actor
- Person
OK, a little strange, but understandably so.
But the explosion of parallel and confusing properties that then appears on the actor's page becomes rather difficult to navigate:
- Gender, Place of Birth, Parents, Children, Siblings, Quotations, all appear twice (Person, Fictional Character)
- Married To (Fictional Character) vs. Spouse(s) (Person)
- Profession (Person) vs. Occupation (Fictional Character)
- Employment History (Person) vs. Employers (Fictional Character)
What amuses me is that the Person type has an Education property missing from Fictional Character, while Fictional Character has Powers or Abilities that we didn't give to Person. There are additional properties unique to each type.
This is an extreme case, but one problem is that it's hard to figure out which property belong to which type. Perhaps the actor himself is married with kids but plays a single version of himself on screen. And if he happens to have a brilliant line in the film (Quotation property), credit should be given to the writer as well. Perhaps a UI feature to indiate/group properties by type?
Another problem is duplicate properties (that belong to the same universe) that result from co-typing. But I guess the solution to that is at the schema level rather than any UI feature.
Actually we are looking at designs for the topic view that will hopefully make it clearer which property comes from which schema. Won't solve all the problems you mention here, but should help.
Created a new type (at my significant other's bequest) for Costume Design
Costume Design as a trade is quite distinct from Theatrical Costume Design in areas of responsibility (gentle hint to those responsible for the Theater domain)
All to find a niche for the inestimable Edith Head.
Film production companies, distributors and other companies
I added three properties to type Film on Sandbox with several supporting types that cover:
1. Production companies -- this is a simple relationship between type Film and type Production Company.
2. Distributors -- This connects type film to type Film Distributor through a Compound Relationship Type (CRT) called Film-Film distributor relationship which includes properties for the year of distribution, the film cut type (director's, special edition) and the medium of distribution (Theatrical, VHS, DVD).
3. Other film companies -- This connects film to companies other than production companies and distrubutors (which are normally accorded a special status, so therefore singled out.) Type Film here connects to "Film Company" via a CRT called "Film-Film company relationship" which includes properties for the role or service provided by that company and which film cut type it contributed to.
Note here that I'm using a couple of new naming conventions. First, I'm suggesting the use of "CRT" for Compound Relationship Type instead of CVT or Compound value Type. This distinction will become increasingly important in the upcoming months as we bake a deeper distinction between these patterns into MQL.
Second, I've named these CRTs with a new convention that describes it as a relationship between two types. For example, "Film-Film company relationship" connects the types Film and Film company.
Here's a film topic example that includes all three ne properties filled out:
http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f80000000000665b4
You'll have to scroll down to the bottom of the Film section.
Please let me know what you think.
Nice. I wonder if it would make sense to create the reverse properties for the production companies, film companies, and film distributors. The reverse on production companies in particular seems like it would be useful; the others perhaps somewhat less so.
I added these types to the production site and I reciprocated the relationships from the company types.
Multiple initial release dates?
Some /film/film instances have multiple values for initial_release_date property.
Example is:
Gridlock'd [ http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000086440a ]
Is this a bug? The dates do not seem tied to e.g. a release in a particular country, and generally I have noticed that there is a full ISO date and a year-only date value.
Multiple initial release dates - is this a bug?
Some /film/film instances have multiple values under "initial_release_date" property.
An example is Gridlock'd [ http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000086440a ]
Usually there is a full ISO format date (e.g. 1997-01-01] and a year-only date (e.g. 1997).
Is this a bug? The dates do not appear to be tied to a release in a particular country or anything like that.
Hmm, looks like inital release date is not restricted to one value, and if you look at the history, it looks like mw_template_bot is adding the date instead of updating.
Another good question is, what led you to check out the topic about the movie Gridlock'd!!!
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me that the release dates would be added instead of updated. Is this expected behaviour?
It's not expected; I'll try to track down who did the update and let them know.
Thanks Bryan!
