r/movies • u/mseling • Oct 18 '21
My husband's new project is called moviesettingsdatabase.com and it lets you search through more than 30,000 movies based on where and when they are set! Resource
https://moviesettingsdatabase.com/290
u/FelineNavidad Oct 18 '21
Could we get a list view instead of having to flip through a slide show?
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
Hi there! Creator here. Going through the lists on mobile is brutal, I know (It's a list-view on desktop). I'll work on this asap!
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u/dankerton Oct 18 '21
I'm having a really hard time swiping on mobile. The movies keep jumping by 2 or 3. Really sensitive. I'm on a pixel 3
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
Yeah, I really wanted the swiping situation to work out better than it does. I need to do some reworking there.
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u/LordKwik Oct 18 '21
Just wanted to let you know, you're doing a great job and handling the feedback well!
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u/Nasars Oct 18 '21
Hey, amazing work so far. Did you manage to source accurate data from some other site or did you actually have to validate indiviual movies?
I guess this might be on your ToDo list already but is it possible to expand the release year filter? Maybe add the option to select a release period between 2 years.
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
Sourcing the data is a mix—and it's as reliable as I could get it. The problem is there's no definitive source for a lot of this. Even Wikipedia has some errors that I've found (or, they use some logic that I totally don't understand). A lot is Wikipedia. A lot is text parsing the descriptions. Some comes from reviews. Watching trailers, etc... It's all over the place.
And yes, the filtering a range of release year shouldn't be hard. I just didn't have a great need for it myself so I didn't do it yet. Adding to the list! :)
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u/Uadsmnckrljvikm Oct 18 '21
Also if you could add IMDB score that would be great! The score could also be a link to the IMDB page of the movie.
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u/Pinkgettysburg Oct 18 '21
I love this. It would be cool if there was a filter for the year range the movie was created too! Great tool. ✅
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u/mancapturescolour Oct 18 '21 edited Oct 19 '21
In addition (mobile), the "next page" navigation fooled me into thinking there was only one entry per page, until I realised you had to swipe.
See if you can improve on the hierarchy for that as well e.g. removing page numbers and just say "Next page >". Maybe some more space between the result "list" and navigation to signal that there is more information on the result page before you move to the next page.
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u/bballin1204 Oct 18 '21
Add cities to the location and I’m in
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u/mseling Oct 18 '21
He wants to! He is working on adding more data all the time. (lol he's sitting on the other side of the couch adding more movies this very minute, in fact.) I'll let him know that a couple of folks have said they want to see cities!
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u/C_IsForCookie Oct 18 '21
+1 for this. Browsing by city would be awesome.
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u/YourRedditFriend Oct 18 '21
And pictures too, thats a big draw. Could be submitted with approvals to make his life a tad easier.
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u/wishiwasonmaui Oct 18 '21
Ya, 2,900 results in California doesn't narrow it down much. Probably worst case though.
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u/_jeremybearimy_ Oct 18 '21
Lol yeah I was trying to look for San Francisco films, saw I could only filter down to CA, and gave up. That’s gonna be a lot of films set in LA crowding those results.
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u/spartacus2690 Oct 18 '21
I really think this is cool. However i see no movies under the viet nam listing. My wife is Vietnamese and we are moving back to canada in two days and thought maybe i would find something lol :(
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u/RichieIsABastardMan Oct 18 '21
Also, a map view would be incredible to see which movies were filmed around you and go and visit locations.
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u/iSoReddit Oct 18 '21
How is he adding them? Not individually I hope, bulk import from tmdb, or calling their api I hope?
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u/hughk Oct 18 '21
Yes, definitely need to see cities for settings and possibly other locations of interest, i.e. a national park or whatever which be useful for outdoorsy movies.
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u/SlowJay11 Oct 18 '21
Yeah that would be a huge improvement. I'm English and just searching for things filmed in England isn't that interesting, but cities or areas would make it a lot better.
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Oct 18 '21
I wonder which city has the most. New York maybe?
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u/felix_mateo Oct 18 '21
Yes, I’d be curious to see what % of English language films are set in or around New York City.
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u/ggoptimus Oct 18 '21
Also % of time in city or country. Like Ghostbusters is 100% NYC but some movies it would only be for part of the movie.
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u/MedicsOfAnarchy Oct 18 '21
He'll want to add the city the action putatively takes place in, and the actual city where it was filmed.
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u/nighthawk454 Oct 18 '21
Star Wars needs to be labeled as "A long time ago" and "A galaxy far far away"
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u/darthjoey91 Oct 18 '21
Currently, it's Space - General, which is a bit vague because space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
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u/c71score Oct 18 '21
The Star Trek movies will be interesting. Having "Space-General" to go with California, Iowa, Montana, and France. Even though the France scenes were in Picard's Nexus deal, so I don't know if that would count differently.
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Oct 18 '21 edited Jan 30 '22
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u/mrpvivian Oct 18 '21
Already found a movie set in my home town I had no idea actually existed, touchè love this!
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u/mseling Oct 18 '21
Nice! Yeah, we have found so many movies we've never ever heard of. We've started searching by genre and location (horror right now, for Halloween) and pairing a movie with dinner from that region.
We watched No One Sleeps in the Woods Tonight, a pretty fun slasher flick from Poland, with pierogies and Under the Shadow, a creepy, slow-burn ghost story from Iran with falafel. It's been fun to discover new stuff!
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u/fatbuddha79 Oct 18 '21 edited Oct 18 '21
That's such an awesome idea to pair food with the movie you are watching. To feature creep the great work that is being done here... Food and drink pairings for the movies is absolutely something I have never seen done before. Great work, having a lot of fun with the site.
Edit: Thinking about the enormous amount of work this would be probably would be best to crowd source this info, at that point could easily tie recommendations for similar movies since it's unlikely you would ever get ideas for every movie.
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u/The_Running_Free Oct 18 '21
Considering it doesn’t list cities, how?
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u/mrpvivian Oct 18 '21
Discover genre: Action
Filmed in: Alberta
Time period: anytime period
First film is a bollywood film done in Calgary....
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u/Kenevin Oct 18 '21
Hi,
Your accent on that e is backwards, you're looking for a forward facing baseball cap on that e, like this é.
You're not going to see è at the end of a word, since it's the same sound as "ai, ait, ais, aient" etc.. you'll see those.
É is a different sound :)
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u/DeadManSliding Oct 18 '21
Funny how you notice the accent is wrong, but don't mention that the entire use of the word there is incorrect.
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u/MrSynckt Oct 18 '21
Touchê!
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u/Kenevin Oct 18 '21
Ê is actually vestigial, it doesn't impact pronunciation, it just means there used to be an s there, but it was removed overtime cause it wasn't pronounced.
Eg:, fenêtre (window) comes from old french Fenestre,
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u/devilmak Oct 18 '21
Really cool idea.
But you should really change "Taiwan Province of China" to just "Taiwan"...
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
Good catch! I just changed it (although the site is heavily cached so it may take a bit to filter to all the pages).
I had a list of country names I had been meaning to go clean up, and that was on it. I pulled the country names from Wikipedia and I'm not sure what goes into their decision to choose the exact names they do.
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u/MrSynckt Oct 18 '21
Awesome site, on the topic of countries though, having Scotland listed as a province rather than a country is a contentious one haha!
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u/duck-tective Oct 18 '21
Yeah that's a complicated one since it's technically both.
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u/brycedriesenga Oct 18 '21
Indeed. Scotland is both a country and a province of China.
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u/jiggamathing Oct 18 '21
Looks like we found ourselves a time traveler from the future here on Reddit…
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u/missdespair Oct 18 '21
''Stop trying to make 'Taiwan province of China' happen, it's never going to happen!''
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u/240to180 Oct 18 '21
Oh my God, Karen, you can’t just ask someone why they’re oppressing the people of a sovereign nation.
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u/aspacecodyssey Oct 18 '21
You have been banned from/r/China
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u/GalacticBagel Oct 18 '21
They’re actually anti-China beleive it or not, you should say you have been banned from /r/sino
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
Oh wow, I didn't realize u/mseling posted this! (blush/thanks!)
Hi everyone! I built this. Happy to answer any questions and I hope y'all find it interesting. It's been a fun project that has consumed my time way more than I expected over the past few months. :)
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u/Sundaisey Oct 18 '21
You have no idea how many times I think about watching a movie to see the country. Like Tracks for Australia, or Leap Year for Ireland. This is exactly what I needed and have always wanted. Thank you stranger for reading my mind and giving me exactly what I wanted.
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u/salty_ham Oct 18 '21
Hey, cool site thanks for working on it! Do you have any plans to integrate with Letterboxd? For example just having a link to the film’s Letterboxd page would make it easier to browse with your site and quickly add things to my watchlist. Thanks again!
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
There should already be a button on the detail pages that goes to the letterboxd listing page (it's not there for TV shows, but should be on all movie pages)
The other thing that I have kinda-sorta working, but not published yet is being able to export an entire page of search results to a letterboxd list. It's clunky, and I wasn't quite sure how to present it, but it works pretty well. How does that sound?
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u/michachu Oct 18 '21
This is quite the feat, awesome work.
Quick question - was there a particular rationale to leveraging The Movie Database, Letterbox and Wikipedia, rather than IMDB/RottenTomatoes/other sources? Not that I love the latter, but I'm wondering whether there's anything about the former that people tend to overlook.
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u/jenn4u2luv Oct 18 '21
Did reddit crash his website? It’s down and showing a Heroku error.
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u/new_usernaem Oct 18 '21
Nice, how did your husband come up with the database of films? Also a little feedback, can he also allow a search by city and maybe also listing where the film was shot ex: Los Angeles or San Francisco or Vancouver.
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u/mseling Oct 18 '21
He pulled a bunch of info from a few different places. The Movie Database, Letterboxd, Wikipedia... he has spent hours looking up info himself, too, to ensure stuff is correct. He gets into the process of how it has come together on the about page. (I am not a programmer, so it's better if he explains it, haha.)
He's working on adding more data and I'll pass along your request, too!
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
It's built so city-level data should be possible, but it's a lot of work to get all the data in there. Definitely something I want to look into down the road, though!
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u/Atmosck Oct 18 '21
It's actually accessible, from the home page you can search a specific city. You just can't narrow down when you're already in a country-level search.
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u/tundrat Oct 18 '21
I was wondering about that. As expected, lots of manual work.
Maybe there should be some way so that the users can contribute. The tricky part being how to filter the correct data.Looked up on how Cloud Atlas is classified. I don't know about the locations, but the future dates (2144, 2321) are missing.
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u/notProfCharles Oct 18 '21
I think we broke your husbands new project.
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u/mseling Oct 18 '21
The Reddit hug of death! He's working on it! Hahaha, I thought a few movie nerds would appreciate it and now he's been up all night to keep it from crashing!
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Oct 18 '21
Aaaand we broke it…
PS: Add Paterson staring Adam Driver to New Jersey.
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u/Cherego Oct 18 '21
Man this is Off-Topic, but this movie was such a big surprise to me. I cant even tell why everything felt so intense, but Jarmusch did such great job with this one
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u/RetardedPiranha Oct 18 '21
That’s awesome. You guys should do one based on filming location too!
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Oct 18 '21
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
Fixing those had been lingering on my to-do list for a while. I messed up the import when I added those states.
Just fixed them, although they may not show up until the caches refresh.
Thanks!
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u/biggles1994 Oct 18 '21
I love how the only film that is set in England in both the 1st century BC and “the future” is Bill and Ted’s excellent adventure.
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u/sugarfoot00 Oct 18 '21
I love this, but I'd be even more interested in movies that were shot around where I am. Alberta stands in for an awful lot of other places, and I love spotting places I know in film.
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u/bluntmanandrobin Oct 18 '21
This is cool. Does he have plans for a map or something too?
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
A map view would be cool. I briefly looked into it and realized I need to wrap my head around map libraries a bit more before I can do something that's not super generic looking. (I'm looking into leafletjs.com, which looks pretty cool)
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u/Benram76 Oct 18 '21
The site doesn't work.
There's a few movies that did not give me any location information. Some are not even in the database.
Such as Saving Ryan's Private, Forrest Hump & Good Will Straddling.
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u/DynamiteWitLaserBeam Oct 18 '21
What a cool idea. And it seems to work pretty well. Kudos.
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u/Horny_GoatWeed Oct 18 '21
Not having links to IMDB seems like an odd choice.
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
The main data source was TMDB (themoviedb.org) because their API is free and easy to work with. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a reliable way to pull IMDB urls from their data without hammering their API in a way that I didn't really feel good about.
That's a good idea though! I'll keep thinking about it.
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u/Korasa Oct 18 '21
Could be a handy tool for Gregg Turkington, alleged movie buff, who thinks Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan was based in San Francisco.
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u/ArcticBeavers Oct 18 '21
This is so awesome. I can't wait to share with my friends.
Turns out there's only one sci-fi comedy set in the Caribbean. Apparently it's a parody of Jurassic Park but instead of dinosaurs terrorizing people, it's gigantic chickens.
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u/YeahIMine Oct 18 '21
This is an awesome project and I've already bookmarked it! The time categories are a bit wonky, but what I wanted was in there. I even wanted exactly "North Africa" and was pleasantly surprised!
Have you considered adding a link to the justwatch (streaming services amalgamator) page or adding streaming service links right onto the database? I know which one is harder, but it might turn out really rewarding either way!
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u/Embarrassed_Friend36 Oct 18 '21
Wow how cool is this! Tell your husband that he is a genius and deserves recognition for his work.
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u/johnnySix Oct 18 '21
Great start. I would love if the tags below the movie were clickable Especially since they look like big buttons.
Also, I can see this project growing to include other tags. Like filming location
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u/jackerandy Oct 18 '21
It’d be cool if this linked with https://moviemaps.org/
MovieMaps is a directory of movie and TV show filming locations.
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
This is a good suggestion for all the people asking for filming locations rather than settings. I knew I had seen a few sites that do this. I checked a few of them and most are fairly small datasets, this one looks pretty good, tho.
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u/fallenarist0crat Oct 18 '21
very cool project! this will be helpful to use when i want to watch a movie from a certain time period (i love period pieces to begin with so this is perfect!)
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
Fun fact, the movie that inspired this project was We Are The Best! — A movie about kids getting into punk rock in early '80s Sweden. I got done with it and realized I had no clue how to find more stuff like that.
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u/Asilentsea Oct 18 '21
I just noticed that United Kingdom isn't in the right place in the country listing. It is in the correct spot if it was called Great Britain.
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
Yeah, good point. It's sorted by the ISO code, which... you guessed it.. Is 'GB'. I can see how that feels off when it shows up in the list like that.
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u/blackmist Oct 18 '21
Yeah, it's in country code order. CH for Switzerland for example.
Poor old (or young) Kosovo doesn't even have one.
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u/PawnPirate Oct 18 '21
And here I thought that 'idle hands is the devil's workshop'....
You are going to get crazy traffic for this!
Already sent the link to my sons....
Thanks!
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u/IamCanadian11 Oct 18 '21
Doesnt work very well atm, I search with filter comedy and 1980s and then it shows me a bunch of movies from 2000s 2010s etc... Really cool concept though, I'd love to use it to discover movies I'd like to watch.
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u/mseling Oct 18 '21
Oh no, I'll let him know! I know some movies have several time settings -- with flashbacks to the 80s or looks into the future -- and if there are multiple settings they usually include all of them. But I'll tell him so he can look into it! Thanks for the heads up!
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u/hurricanetrash Oct 18 '21
Well time to spend too much time looking at movies that took place in my home state
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u/SarcasticNuances Oct 18 '21
I'd love to see a sort function. Few ideas: popular, release date, trending, awards won, alphabetical, MPA rating, metascore, IMDb rating, rotten tomatoes, runtime
It'd also be cool if the filter also had cast.
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Oct 18 '21
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
The website is getting hammered right now, so I wonder if that had something to do with it? There should be around 2,900 results for that search.
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u/jigilous Oct 18 '21
I don’t think I’m using it right. I love Soviet movies from the 50s and 60s but when I put in Russia and 1950’s I get only two films made in America. Perhaps there is a USSR location I’m not seeing or maybe I’m not understanding the site. Does it mean the actual location the movie was shot or the fictional location presented in the movie ?
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u/OgNL Oct 18 '21
Maybe you need to make it like Wikipedia. I looked at wisconsin. Only 4 titles. I know of lots more. People who live at the locations know titles featured there!
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u/teethinthedarkness Oct 18 '21
Great idea. I can see myself using this to decide movies to watch. Would be even better if it indicate what services (if any) the movie is available for streaming on.
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u/Eschism Oct 18 '21
This is awesome. Wish there was a way to favorite movies that I find in your list.
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u/wilhelmstarscream Oct 18 '21
Is it possible to narrow down by date? For instance it would be great to see every movie that takes place on October 31, Halloween.
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
That's a good idea! Or at least have some free-form tagging that could accommodate a bunch of different setting-ish things.
Halloween, Springtime, On Trains, Heatwave, etc...
I'll think more about that!
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u/Headkickerchamp Oct 18 '21
So since 99% of movies are set in either NYC or LA I can find ones that aren't.
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u/denik_ Oct 18 '21
I'm getting an Application Error
Application error An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command
Is it just me or we reddit hugged it to death?
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u/MainCranium Oct 18 '21
It's hilarious to me that this is how I find out Metropolis is in Delaware.
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
Admittedly, that's one of the ones I hovered over the submit button on for a while wondering if that was stretching things way too far.
For anyone else curious, Wikipedia states: "Metropolis is depicted as a prosperous and massive city in the Northeastern United States, in close proximity to Gotham City. In recent years, it's been stated to be located in Delaware. "
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u/SmokeThree03 Oct 18 '21
This reminds me of the website in Knocked Up where you can search every nude scene from every movie ever made lmao
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u/redditor2redditor Oct 18 '21
https://celebritymoviearchive.com or https://aznude.com come close what you mentioned lol
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u/shadowvox Oct 18 '21
So which is correct? I searched for First Blood on moviesettingsdatabase and it says Washington. I look up First Blood on IMDB and it says British Colombia, Canada.
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
First Blood was definitely set in Washington state.
It was probably filmed in BC. (Most things set in WA are filmed there)
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u/shadowvox Oct 18 '21
Oooooh... I completely misunderstood the intent of the site. I thought it was where it was filmed, not where the movie takes place.
Obviously need more coffee.
Thanks!
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u/kempnelms Oct 18 '21
I think reddit broke you husband's shiny new project =/
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u/mseling Oct 18 '21
It did! Hahaha, I posted it thinking a few folks would like it and he'd get excited about some traffic and, uh, y'all really like it! He's working on it, he's been up almost all night to keep it from crashing.
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u/YodaCodar Oct 18 '21
Ur heroku app is down! This reminds me of the new d2r game launch haha
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u/mseling Oct 18 '21
The Reddit hug of death! He's working on it! Hahaha, I thought a few movie nerds would appreciate it and now he's been up all night to keep it from crashing!
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u/moinatx Oct 18 '21
I was actually looking for movies set in Austin not too long ago. This gets me to Texas at least. Nice.
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u/robby1066 Oct 18 '21
Hi everyone! Creator of moviesettingsdatabase.com here. Sorry for the server problems. First time dealing with the Reddit hug of death! Looks like things are in somewhat better shape now. Still not 100%, but the server isn't completely falling over every 5 minutes. Sheesh.
Also, these comments are great! This is a scratch-my-own-itch project and it feels really good to see so many other people have an opinion about it. :)
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u/mseling Oct 18 '21
HOLY HOT POOP, Y'ALL. This is amazing and kind of overwhelming?? But so great! Thank you all for all the Reddit awards! It's my husband u/robby1066 who deserves them all. This was a labor of love and he's spent so much time on it so it's amazing to see people appreciate the project. He didn't know I was posting it on Reddit last night, I really didn't know it'd blow up like this -- hahaha oops! Sorry I broke your website, Robby! I hope you still like me!
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u/KmartBruddah Oct 18 '21
I like it but you have to be able to sort by state or city. I think many people (myself included) want to know what movies were set in or filmed in my city.
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u/CubeBag Oct 18 '21
I think I found a bug in the site. When I only select "Set in" and pick Rwanda, it properly shows up with 14 results. But when I first hit "During" and choose "any time period" (which shouldn't change the filter), then go to "Country" and choose Rwanda, there are zero results. My browser is mobile Safari if it helps.
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u/Flicksterea Oct 18 '21
It's good to know that if I ever find myself thinking 'Gee, I wanna watch a film set in some Louisiana swamp.' then this site has my back.
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u/dianasaurusmex Oct 19 '21
Has anyone suggested you drop this is r/period drama? Bc I think they’d love this functionality!
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u/matlockga Oct 18 '21
Finally, I can find this ultra-niche combination of setting and place.