Filmein | Devpost

Facebook login
Main/Login page
Main menu
Sample profile with movies and analytics chart
Main menu with additional icons
Sample movies populating the tiled areas of the screen

Inspiration

Last.fm and other social media websites that analyze what you (and plausibly your friends) like to do for entertainment and the trends with which you do so. Our inspiration was almost entirely to do this on the analysis of which movies the person (and his Facebook friends) have watched, enjoy watching, and would like to watch in order to better understand what kind of person they truly are.

What it does

It scrapes data on movies from relevant movie database APIs, parses said data, and organizes it into tiled regions at the user's will. The app also primarily relies on the user's Facebook profile to parse the data on what movies they have watched and what movies they may watch in the future. Due to this "predictability" engine, there is a high degree of statistical inference going into the project and shows some great promise on the front of data mining and clustering techniques, were we to take it further in development.

How I built it

We first built the UI and molded the idea of how the idea and proof of concept would work. Next, we introduced ourselves to the APIs relevant to this project (Facebook, The MovieDatabase, OMDb, etc.) and saw what types of things we could create and build upon from there. With that, we set upon coding and experimented with many different ways of doing things and learning more about Angular.js, which we came to rely upon heavily in this competition.

Challenges I ran into

The Facebook API was sometimes very burdensome and hard to understand. Building a responsive UI was also quite challenging to do with all of the backend processing we had to perform in tandem. In addition, the requirement of many different platforms working together was daunting as well and fluidity could not easily be reached due to the amount of tasks we wanted our app to perform. However, I would say overachieving or being overambitious were not challenges in this project in the least, which may appear somewhat surprising.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We finished the majority of our final goals in the end and surpassed our initial expectations by far. I am proud of how quickly we could do things that we thought would take us much longer to accomplish, such as the UI and integration with different APIs.

What I learned

Many, many things. We learned a lot of new things about JavaScript (especially Angular.js) and developing a medium-sized, API dependence-heavy application with a novel approach to entertainment. We learned also how to better collaborate with using Git (most of the team had never done a project with 4 people on one repository) and produce efficient commits, pushes, and pulls to better serve us.

What's next for Filmein

Keep customizing and producing new features. First will be further integration with Facebook, including integration with friends lists and comparisons of what and how many movies are seen of each director, genre, etc. After that, we intend to perhaps branch into different spheres of personal data analysis as well.