Dealing with Crew/Studio Info

[ozmosis82]

Is it possible to have fields like Director, Writer, Producer and Studio to do the same thing that the Genre and Country fields do in DVDpedia? You know, where you enter in a genre and it separates them like keywords? I think this would be important for the statistics section in that it would aggregate stats based on the appearance of a name as its own keyword instead of the entire string of text in the field.

The way those fields are currently implemented, if I have multiple directors, writers, or producers assigned, the stats section treats it as one individual (even if they're separated by commas). So instead of having stats for how many movies are produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (for shame, I know), I have many separate stats for movies produced by him and other people (like "Jerry Bruckheimer, Arnold Koppelson" and "Jerry Bruckheimer, Emma Thomas").

And ESPECIALLY for the Studio field, since a movie can have many (major) studios producing it.

[Conor]

Thank you for the feedback. We plan to update these fields since they do allow for more than one value on a regular basis. In the meantime continue using the comma as it will be the default separator. If you are feeling like making a small change in an text file, you can update the way statistics are counted with the information in this post. Although specific to Gamepedia just find the director and writer fields in the XML file and change the type to "2".

[ozmosis82]

Sweeeeeeeeeeet. Thanks, Conor!

Oh, and a belated congratulations to you and Nora! I wish you two nothing less than all the happiness life can afford!

[Conor]

Thank you.

[ozmosis82]

I posted this a year ago, but please don't take this (pseudo-)bump as my way of being impatient. I just sort of wanted to update what I was requesting.

I still think it's important to use the same keyword/tag method to input things like studios, but for directors, writers and producers I think it might be useful to amalgamate the cast and crew information. I imagine that this would require an incredible amount of work in terms of coding, so I don't know if it's actually realistic to request this sort of functionality, but I just think that (for movies... and even music sometimes) it would make sense to be able to add someone's name and then be able to choose a role for them.

It might clean the data entry up a bit, because instead of having multiple fields (director, producer, writer, etc.) you could have one section where users can input the names of people, and then associate certain roles (customizable, of course). It would also allow for people to keep track of things like executive producers, authors (when a movie is based on a book), composers, cinematographers, etc. All of these people contribute immensely to the making of a film (or, when it comes to music: producers, engineers, etc.) and it seems a shame to have to relegate them to a custom field (which is kind of a limited in and of itself).

Anyway, just my thoughts. Like I said earlier, I realize that that probably means an incredible amount of work if it were to be implemented, and I certainly am under no illusions that I expect it to be done simply because I'm asking.

Keep up the great work! Looking forward to your iOS app!

[Alex]

Well there's the Credits tab which already has a person/role structure fully customizable, would this not work for what you want?

[ozmosis82]

It would, but it seems redundant to also have fields under the Main tab. Also, I don't think the Credits tab is used for statistical purposes like specific fields are... (Meaning understanding the difference between an actor playing a role, and a crew member performing their role.) I know there is an "All Credit Names" stat, but that's kind of vague.

Now, if you put a certain string of text in that Credits field and DVDpedia auto-filled the appropriate field in other sections, that would be neat.