Pre-screening movies before dropping the cash to see them in theaters is a must. Great tools like Metacritic and IMDb have given us access to thousands of opinions but, armed with this intel, how much better have we really gotten at finding hidden gems while dodging box office bombs? With reviews, quantity is not a fair substitute for quality. How can we accurately vet films if we aren't able to find reviews by people with the same sensibilities as ourselves?

Silver Screener, a mobile application built over the course of a mere 24 hours, aims to do just that.

 

Relying on bleeding edge features provided by the Salesforce and AT&T Call Management APIs and the time constraints forced upon us by the AT&T Developer Summit Hackathon 2013, my team and I set about building a smarter way to vet feature films. Knowing that enjoyable moviegoing experiences are dependent on both the film itself as well as the people watching it, we sketched out a system that would collect feedback from viewers and digest it in a variety of meaningful ways.

 

Users provide their reviews in the form of a 30-seconds-or-less audio snippet. These snippets, collected and stored using the AT&T Call Management API, allow other users to get a sense of a reviewer's critique along with her or his intonation, paralanguage, and other speech characteristics—each important for helping the listner determine the value of the review. Next, the reviewer leaves a Likert rating of the film, allowing for simple averages to be calculated. All of this information is then stored centrally along with additional metadata (such as users' location) used to enhance the review.

 

When looking for intel on recently released movies, users can then sort through films based on reviews left by other, similar, users. The data collected is intelligently filtered by viewing history, preferences, location, age, and more, providing results that are highly tuned in to a specific user. From there, users can listen to the review snippets, giving them additional information from which to make a decision. The result is a faster and more accurate vetting process.

 

Finally, the data collected by Silver Screener can be collated and shared with movie studios and select other groups to be used to refine their work in the future. This can help studios market their movies more effectively in the future by giving them a real-time understanding of a particular film's uptake based on a wide array of factors.

My role in the project was to help flesh out the basic interaction between users and the app, to design the user interface, and to give the concept an appropriate identity. Working with a highly talented team of developers, we managed to churn out a prototype in less than a day.

 

The Silver Screener Team ultimately impressed judges and took home the top prize in their category.