1 – How to guess the movies?

2 – How to be faster in replying?

1 – How to guess the movies?

When you see a picture or hear a music from the soundtrack you may recognize immediately the movie and give the answer. If you have absolutely no clues, you may disregard that quiz. However, you may have some hints and with some search you can get there. As some participants (with more web experience) surely know these techniques, I’ll try to explain some to make things fairer.

The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) is the ultimate resource to search and find movies. If you see a movie’s frame and don’t know which one is it but recognize an actor in that frame, you can go to imdb.com and search for that actor. You’ll see there all that actor’s movies and you even can sort them by ratings (so you can see which are his best films), by genre (if you recall that the movie in question was a western, for instance),… If you know more actors from that movie, you can even search for movies where those actors participated. In the search page (www.imdb.com/search) you have many types of searches and don’t forget to see the links in the left bar (power search, people working together, complex title search,…).

To win the quizzes you have to answer with their titles in English or in the movie’s original language. If you only know the title of the movie in your native language, you can go here http://akas.imdb.com (the “also known as” search) and search for that movie. In the results you will find the movie with the title in its original language and in many other languages.

And what if you don’t know any of the actors, the name of the movie,… but remember seeing that movie, remember parts of the plot? Let me give you a personal example. Some time ago I wanted to identify a movie that I had partly seen and could only remember some details of the plot. I knew that it was basically a trip of two friends with an older woman and the explanation to what happened there was that she had cancer. So, I went to IMDB and searched by keyword.

I tried cancer. I still got 578 titles.

It was too much for me to go check one by one to see if I remembered the title of the movie.

So I clicked on the keyword cancer and I went to the cloud of keywords presented by IMDB in that page in order to refine the search

and tried to see if there was the keyword “trip” there. Better than that, the keyword “road trip” was there with just 7 titles.

By clicking in that keyword I saw the 7 titles and there it was the movie I was looking for: Y tu mamá tambien (2001).

So, you can see that just with two ideas it’s also possible to guess the name of a movie.

2 – How to be faster in replying?

If you only use Twitter on the web, you can only see if there’s a new quiz when you go to your browser and read the tweets of your timeline. That way it will be hard to be the first to guess the quizzes because there are ways to be notified whenever a quiz is launched and there are participants using it.

One way is to use some Twitter desktop application that can filter the Twitter’s timeline. At the moment I’m using Tweetdeck.

It allows you to create user groups (which are displayed in columns) that will allow you to feature the tweets from @iknowthatmovie in a clearly visible fashion. Better than that, you can configure a column to display a Twitter search for “iknowthatmovie” so you see there every tweet from @iknowthatmovie and every reply to them. This is an excellent way to see the quizzes and their replies. What is seen there is the same presented by “The Eye” page of this blog. So, another method is to have that page open. The page is updated every 10 seconds so you’ll see new quizzes appear almost immediately and every reply to them.

You can also subscribe to the @iknowthatmovie’s Twitter page RSS feed or even to the iknowthatmovie’s keyword Twitter search to be notified. There are a lot of software to deal with the RSS feeds and even your browser probably can manage them.

One particular case that I found very common is people at work using a machine with Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6, Outlook 2003 and serious limitations to install software. A good way to be notified of a new quiz is via Outlook as many permanently work with that tool. As Outlook 2003 doesn’t support subscribing to RSS feeds, you may want to install RSS Popper, a free news aggregator add-in for Outlook. It can be installed even without administrator’s privileges and lets you subscribe to the feed and receive in your Outlook messages as you receive emails whenever a quiz is launched.

If you want help in using the tools mentioned here or have any doubt, please contact me. I’ll be glad to help.