Monday, November 11, 2013

Movie Diary

Not sure how many of you click on it, but I've had a link pointing towards my "Watched Movies" for a while. It's also been the source of some of my favourite posts where I compile useless numbers and post graphs regarding the number of movies I watch over a six month time period:


In case you don't see, that's a solid year of film right there. As we come up to another year of movies (including a full calendar year of January to December - a first in my log), I began to evaluate how I'm keeping track of these films. The platform of choice has been IMDb, but I've hit certain limitations on it. The major one that I just can't get around is not being able to add a second viewing to the list. IMDb allows only one film per list, so it's not that good at a movie diary. In the past I've manually entered things in for the odd film here and there, but that's not going to be viable long term. 

IMDb was also a bit plain looking.


So I spent a morning taking a look around to see what else was available, with the most important feature in mind. I stumbled across Letterboxd, which was described as a social network for movie lovers. You could make lists, add movies to them and share your reviews and ratings. You can add friends and keep a diary of films you've watched. I checked it out right away, opened an account and tried adding a second viewing of a film. It worked, and it worked really well. You can add any film, record the day you watched it, add any comments/review and submit it handily to your movie diary. And because the site is geared towards social, it's quite easy to share everything (all your lists may be public by default). 


Which brings us to the Watched Movies link. You'll see that it now points directly to my Movie Diary on Letterboxd, and you'll find the Movie Collection link brings you to a list I created to keep track of what Blurays I own. This one I'm a bit more hesitant to use, as it doesn't keep track of actual releases, only movies. So I may look for another service for that. Right now, I'm still using the Google spreadsheet, but will publish this list as it's much nicer to look at.

I'm also updating the link to be called Movie Diary.

And since I love you all so much, I subscribed to the pro version of Letterboxd, which allowed me to import my list from IMDb in, so none of that date is lost. It also provides me with a "Year in Review" page that I couldn't resist. This page brings some nice stats, including some that would have been impossible for me to compile on my own, including most watched genre, actor, director and how many hours of movies watched. Which can be a scary number to think about.


So that's it for now, I hope you all enjoy the updates! I'm definitely having fun putting this stuff together!

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