[HN Gopher] Ordering movie credits with graph theory
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Ordering movie credits with graph theory
Author : sigil
Score : 146 points
Date : 2021-12-21 17:48 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (endcrawl.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (endcrawl.com)
| zestyping wrote:
| Why? What's the point of trying to come up with a single optimal
| order? Every movie does it differently and probably has reasons
| for doing so. This seems like investing a huge amount of work to
| solve a problem that no one really needs the solution to.
| conroy wrote:
| > probably has reasons for doing so
|
| Probably not. They do credits for movies of all sizes. If
| you're doing a small student film, do you really want to think
| about the order of your credits? This gives you a great default
| choice.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| You probably want to pay particular attention to credit order
| on a student film since it's often the only compensation
| there is for a lot of the crew.
| Zababa wrote:
| > What's the point of trying to come up with a single optimal
| order?
|
| On the frontpage of Endcrawl, the company behind this blog
| post:
|
| > Ace your end credits and de-stress post production with the
| solution used by over 2,000 films and series.
|
| Having a standard template seems like a way to easily "de-
| stress post production", and maybe even "ace your end credits".
| If this actually becomes an industry standard, the company
| behind it would also get some publicity. I've personally never
| even thought about how credits were made, and never knew that
| there were companies focused on just this point. Now I know
| that Endcrawl exist, and have a positive opinion of them
| because they wrote an intersting blog post, that could be used
| as a reference for other ordering problems. They're also
| trading this standard template for your email address:
| https://endcrawl.com/template/
| noxvilleza wrote:
| I wonder, now that there's a metric for what are the most
| "normal" credit structures, what the most abnormal structures
| are.
|
| Also interested why they went with Trueskill over Glicko 2, since
| it's just 1v1 'encounters' anyway.
| ridaj wrote:
| I wonder if the low level production assistants tasked with
| putting together the credit lists cost enough to justify the work
| going into this.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| That is the premise of the startup that funded this work. Use
| their tools to build the credits at both higher quality and
| cheaper than the current approach. Having a standard order
| (that is modifiable when needed) both establishes creditability
| and seems necessary to auto-generate credits when the list of
| creditable people provided is unordered.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| What is the abomination of a webpage that removes the scroll bar?
| Pass.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Not being a movie buff, I really did not understand the basics of
| what the goal is here. (There was a problem statement, but it
| really didn't give the 50,000 foot view.) After having read much
| of the article, I think I can summarize it.
|
| (1) Whose name comes up first when the credits roll matters in
| some way. Presumably people feel slighted if they don't have the
| right amount of prominence or something like that.
|
| (2) Apparently, despite this being important enough to worry
| about, and even though there are standardized titles, and even
| though people have been making movies for well over 100 years,
| there isn't a consensus or standardized order. Seemingly every
| film just sort of does something they feel is appropriate.
|
| (3) It must be a fair assumption that people who arrange credits
| do it with purpose, so that if you look at the order they chose,
| it tells you something meaningful about what the right order is.
|
| (4) The goal, then, is to basically computationally reverse
| engineer what order people have in mind when they put credits on
| film and produce an ordering that reflects actual practice as
| accurately as possible.
|
| (5) This is a messy process because the data is inconsistent and
| contradictory, so it is fertile ground for creatively applying
| algorithms to tease out the meaningful parts.
| tzs wrote:
| "Cheers" had an interesting solution to a conflict over who
| should come first, or perhaps more accurately who should not be
| second. Ted Danson and Shelley Long both wanted top billing.
|
| The solution was to have Shelley Long on the upper right of the
| first screen with names and to have Ted Danson on the lower
| left of that screen. The credits were the consecutive screen
| type, not the long scroll type, so the two names appeared at
| the same time.
|
| Long would be read first by someone who read down, and Danson
| would be read first by someone going left to right. The
| producers were able to convince both Long and Danson that they
| were not second.
|
| The rest of the main cast each got a screen afterwards with
| just their name on it.
|
| Here's the credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS0VQOHX7lM
|
| When Long left and Kirstie Alley joined the cast as the new
| female lead and there was now no question than Danson was the
| star of the show there were no more special screens. Each main
| cast member got their own screen, with Danson's being the first
| shown.
|
| Here's that version:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGdpE8Dsr0U
| dylan604 wrote:
| (1) is sometimes contractually obligated
|
| (2) commonly, once the leads or "above the fold" credits, they
| list by department with leads listed first, then plebes last.
| Look at all of the 3D artists. Just a list of names. Above
| them, are the project managers, above them are directors,
| producers, etc.
|
| *all of the above comes from personal involvement. sometimes
| asking a direct question of "what goes first" is responded with
| "I'll get back to you", but never does. "Just do what everyone
| else does" is common response too.
|
| you have to remember that the person doing the credits is
| pretty much the lowest of jobs. nobody wants to do this job,
| and it is often assigned to intern level assignments. "take
| this Word Doc/Excel/.txt, and turn it into a graphic". Every
| post house I've worked in has always cried "there must be a
| better way".
| dylan604 wrote:
| Where I stated "above the fold", that totally should be
| "above the line". This isn't a newspaper. DOH!
| utexaspunk wrote:
| I think the primary goal here is to create an exercise for
| exploring different graph theory concepts, not to actually be
| useful. You're thinking too much :)
| melony wrote:
| Imaginary ego boosts is always better than having to pay them
| more.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Is there any evidence that they aren't imaginary? For
| example, does be listed early in one project, lead to
| improved likelihood of getting a better placement on the next
| project (with corresponding higher future pay)?
|
| If that is the case, then the perception that one is a "star"
| or whatever, with credit order, mind correlate with future
| success. Of course, that correlation might be independent of
| credit-order placement (such as the actor is actually better
| in the movie and would be perceived as such even without
| credit order placement).
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's almost as if nobody has heard of the term "top
| billing". It's not any different than deciding whose name
| goes on the marquee, on the poster, etc
| sfink wrote:
| Cool article, it's fun to see how many situations can be mapped
| to graph theory.
|
| The description of the cost function seems strange, since it's
| described in terms of the distance from "the correct order". It's
| clear that there is no single correct order. If two movies
| disagree on the ordering, it is not necessarily the case that one
| of them is doing it "wrong".
|
| Mathematically, it seems like it would be better to see any given
| movie's ordering as a sample from a statistical distribution.
| That suggests that computing cost in confidence terms, as in the
| probability of generating that ordering given your assumed
| distribution, might make more semantic sense. So for example you
| could maybe use the frequency graphs from the article and sum up
| the surprise of each path from the first to last entry in your
| list. (Where "surprise" here is the inverse of how frequently one
| node follows another.) That's linear. Or you could do it
| quadratically by making a matrix of A-follows-B frequencies and
| then summing up all pairs of entries in your list (normalizing by
| the length of the list). The latter takes more of the graph
| structure into account.
|
| Which is also the other thing that seemed a bit odd -- it seems
| like the "A follows B" relationship is getting a little mixed up
| with "A immediately follows B". As in, clumping the generator-
| related roles together isn't the same thing as saying an intern
| should follow a principal, and the cost function shouldn't treat
| those constraints the same way. I don't know how much noise it
| introduces, but intuitively it seems like the algorithm probably
| ought to do an ordering and then a clumping. Or perhaps the
| opposite: do ordering within clumps ("everything with 'generator'
| in the name"), then treat the clump as a single component for the
| main ordering pass.
|
| The last thing is that the article seems to take NP-hardness too
| seriously. Sure, if you really had to consider every possible
| permutation, it would take too long. But there's _way_ more than
| enough structure in the problem to take advantage of. Some very
| very conservative heuristics would surely dramatically reduce the
| size of the _relevant_ N that participates in the core NP-hard
| problem. Your Traveling Salesman may have to visit 50 cities in
| each of Oregon and New York, but you _know_ there 's no point in
| making him fly back and forth between the states more than the
| minimally required (2). Write your algorithms in such a way that
| you don't need to even allow the possibility of putting the
| Gaffer behind the Intern Electrician's Boyfriend's Dog.
| sigil wrote:
| _If two movies disagree on the ordering, it is not necessarily
| the case that one of them is doing it "wrong"._
|
| (Author here.) Indeed! This is about trying to discover
| emergent conventions, so we can give first-time filmmakers a
| good starting point.
|
| _Or you could do it quadratically by making a matrix of
| A-follows-B frequencies and then summing up all pairs of
| entries in your list (normalizing by the length of the list).
| The latter takes more of the graph structure into account._
|
| This is what PageRank (Experiment 3) does!
|
| _The last thing is that the article seems to take NP-hardness
| too seriously. Sure, if you really had to consider every
| possible permutation, it would take too long. But there 's way
| more than enough structure in the problem to take advantage
| of._
|
| I ask this question in a footnote [0] -- is this permutation
| space amenable to gradient descent? Don't know the answer! If
| someone knows this area well I'm all ears.
|
| [0] https://endcrawl.com/credits-ordering/#fn:permutation-
| search
| glitcher wrote:
| Off topic:
|
| Does anyone know of a resource where you can search for peoples'
| names that appear in any movie/tv credits? The list of credits
| can be massive, and I don't think sites like IMDb are trying to
| create archival coverage at that level of detail.
| lucasgw wrote:
| IMDb Pro does a very good job of this. But you do need the
| subscription.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| This is a tangent, and I know everything is negotiated via
| contracts but what is the deal with the ordering of names on
| posters not matching the order of the actors on the poster when
| the poster picture is a group photo.
| bena wrote:
| Movie posters are a complex subject. Way more complex than they
| have any right to be.
|
| Look at the poster for "The Towering Inferno". Steve McQueen's
| name is left-most while Paul Newman's name is the highest.
| William Holden is lower than both of them and to the right,
| lining up with McQueen's last name. And Faye Dunaway is about
| half an line lower than Holden's last name.
|
| Then there's fights about how big someone's name/picture can be
| in relation to others.
|
| Look at the live action Beauty and the Beast Poster. Emma
| Watson gets a lot of poster estate and first billing. Then it
| gets a bit crazy. Not to mention, how people are billed is a
| bit contentious as well. You'll notice that it's mostly a list
| of names except the final two. "with Ian McKellen and Emma
| Thompson". That's because being a special mention is worth
| something. It's a way to give prominence to non-leading actors
| who are significant in other ways.
|
| The Thor movies do this with Anthony Hopkins. Clearly he's not
| the lead, but dude has had a career and he was a big get for
| the movies. For Ragnarok, they even toss it to Mark Ruffalo,
| probably as a way to acknowledge his part's significance in the
| film.
|
| Spider-man: Homecoming is another interesting one to look at as
| well as it gives a lot of real estate to Robert Downey Jr. Tom
| Holland has a smaller picture than the Spider-man suit, while
| Robert Downey Jr. is much larger than the Iron Man suit.
| Michael Keaton also gets the double up, but both of his images
| are much smaller.
|
| A lot of the Marvel posters are good to look at to see the
| politicking that goes on as they do a lot of ensemble movies.
|
| And then there's also the fact that sometimes the pictures are
| made before the credits are put on it. So you're locked in an
| image but contracts dictate name order.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Top Billing is the term to learn more.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billing_(performing_arts)#Top_...
| xmprt wrote:
| Because of an antiquated rule where the highest paid or biggest
| actor's name is always left most. So you naturally end up in
| the situation where the biggest actor name is on the left but
| the picture is in the middle.
| smegsicle wrote:
| antiquated? what changed?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Probably for one thing the relative importance of the
| marquee vs standalone posters.
| wingmanjd wrote:
| I had no idea this was the reason! It always annoyed me when
| they didn't match.
| goto11 wrote:
| The names are listed with the biggest star first. Billing order
| is part of the contract. But the posters typically have the
| biggest star in the middle, most visually prominent, and then
| the smaller stars on both sides or sourrounding.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Fun post. Well written and great visuals.
|
| Is it stealing the scroll bar for anyone else? I literally can't
| tell where I am in the article and have to scroll with my mouse
| wheel. Wat?
| scubbo wrote:
| Doesn't this presuppose that there exists a single canonical way
| to order the credits, rather than them being reordered per-
| project? Perhaps the Lighting Electrician role in Love Hard was
| less impactful than in Black Is King, leading to it being
| intentionally ranked lower.
| egypturnash wrote:
| That's my thinking too. It also ignore any and all _social_
| reasons for changing the order.
|
| Shaking out a fairly optimal list that jibes with the instincts
| of people who have read a lot of credits has its uses, though;
| it feels like a good starting point from which to deal with the
| fact that this production had some _incredible_ demands put on
| the Balloon Tech, and that the Basecamp Electrician 's father
| is one of the studio executives and cut a deal to have their
| kid's name higher up in exchange for greenlighting the show. Or
| whatever.
| ridaj wrote:
| No, it acknowledges that common practice varies such that there
| is no canonical ordering, and tries to get at an ordering that,
| when applied, minimizes difference with common practice.
| monocasa wrote:
| I thought most of that was in the union contracts.
| 88 wrote:
| Surely the order of movie credits is a political decision, not a
| technical one?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| yes - but I think the idea was to reduce the perceived level of
| arbitrariness of their ordering by appealing to mathematical
| analysis. Technical analysis is used for this purpose all the
| time.
| btown wrote:
| "The tool you bought said X, I just went with that to get
| something to you quickly" is a great way to Get Things Done
| in any political industry. If stakeholders care, they'll
| override it placing less blame on your shoulders than they
| would otherwise. And tool makers that optimize for minimizing
| surprise can be great allies in this.
| LeonardoTolstoy wrote:
| The main acting credits order in films is an interesting question
| as well which I guess could maybe be answered in a similar
| manner. Some films order actors alphabetically. Some by
| appearance. And some order the first N by some contractually
| reasoning, but then presumably the rest will be ordered less
| strictly, possibly somewhat randomly. I've always wanted to
| tackle the problem of trying to standardize the lists somewhat.
|
| Just an example to explain what I mean. The film Bard Wire has an
| alphabetical cast list (so Pamela Anderson Lee, as she went by at
| the time, is mid way down the credits). Interestingly the "three
| actors" listed by IMDb has Anderson first, but then the next two
| are just the top two on the credits. It would be useful, to a
| degree, to try and figure out who those second and third people
| should be based on some metric.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Ordering by appearance also seems to be common.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Really interesting write up. I hate that this website hides my
| scroll bar, though. And overlaying the ordering right on top of
| the image of the credits as you scroll is irritating. If you want
| to compare the ordering and the credits themselves, you have to
| scroll up and down repeatedly. There is plenty of room to put the
| ordering next to the credits, no "fancy" styling required.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| I didn't even notice until you had pointed it out and now I
| hate it. Thanks for that.
| fudged71 wrote:
| Sort of like movie credits. You have no sense of how much
| longer they are going to take.
|
| Maybe these same folks can add a progress bar to end credits
| across major films ;)
| fudged71 wrote:
| Jumping off the end of the article... Has this technique been
| done with org charts? Is there any place I can dump a list of
| role names and have an "expected" org chart generated?
| jacobr1 wrote:
| There are two preconditions for performing the analysis the
| same way. You need a standardized set of roles between
| companies. And you need a corpus of existing org-charts.
| Between those two, you could compute the "most common" org
| hierarchy. It actually would be interesting just to understand
| how how common titles align across firms, even independent of
| hierarchical structure.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| A completely useless busywork to generate a chart that will
| eventually get upper management to devour each other? Boy,
| that sounds like a job for ISO 9001:
| http://9001quality.com/iso-9001-organizational-structure-
| job...
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(page generated 2021-12-21 23:00 UTC)