About VIFFrank

As a non-industry film fan, I was recently in Toronto during TIFF and was trying to pick a few films from the huge schedule they have. After browsing some TIFF top picks lists, I found myself spending a lot of time plugging titles and directors into IMDB trying to get a feel for what might be decent.

About the same time, I started looking at the Vancouver Film Fest Guide for stuff to check out when I got home, and realized that I was doing exactly the same - copy and pasting titles into IMDB to try and figure out what might be essential viewing.

This got my inner nerd thinking, there's got to be a better way...

The VIFF schedule was scraped using Goutte. The list of titles (defaulting to Original Titles if applicable) was run against Open Movie Database API by Brian Fritz. A lot of short films weren't found, and a lot of premiere films returned no results or similarly named films, so a quick validator tool using iFrames was whipped up to let me blast through and confirm listings. Searching on director name was a reliable patch, and almost all films were located and added to the database. The rankings will autoupdate over the course of the festival. The Grayscale template was used cuz it's clean and purdy. It was written in PHP using Zend because it's both my swiss army knife and comfy old sweater.

A final note: Use this as a tool, but remember that not everything is listed here... Don't ever belittle the magic of catching a premiere of a fantastic film just because it didn't have data to back it up. Pick some random viewing too!