Where are you in the Movie?

May 2, 2009 2:50 PM

Where are you in the Movie?
Enter your birthday, your life expectancy, and choose from a list of movies (at the moment Ghostbusters, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, The Big Lebowski, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off), and it will show you a frame from the second of the movie you're on.
posted by condour75 (20 comments total)

The last little bit of each question is cut off. eg. 'When were you bor'. Other than that, no issues. I appreciated the fact that I could scroll the dropdowns without having to click and drag.
posted by benign at 4:14 PM on May 2, 2009

That's weird.. benign, can you let me know what browser / os you're using?
posted by condour75 at 4:39 PM on May 2, 2009

Made me feel young. I'm yet to leave Mos Eisley!

BTW, Same 'bor' issue with me. (Firefox 3/Ubuntu)
posted by popcassady at 4:46 PM on May 2, 2009

I'm also running Firefox 3 on Ubuntu and have the same problem. Screenshot here.
posted by aheckler at 5:36 PM on May 2, 2009

Awesome, thanks for screenshotting that -- I think I fixed it, flash wasn't embedding a font which it should've been.

Lot of ubuntu users here, I'm impressed!

And yeah, I'm still on tattoine but they've already left the bar. Unfortunately, I had to use the special edition, so the next six months of my life are going to be Han interacting with CG Jabba.
posted by condour75 at 6:29 PM on May 2, 2009 [1 favorite]

You might want to explain somewhere what it is you're doing. if you're like is 33% over you show a frame 33% through the movie. But honestly I couldn't tell how you were picking frames. You ought to say something like "if we started playing this movie the day you were born, and stretched it over your entire life, this is the frame it would be on right now"
posted by delmoi at 10:31 PM on May 2, 2009 [1 favorite]

Just added that, Delmoi. Thanks for the suggestion, once you work on something like this for a while, you forget what needs explaining.
posted by condour75 at 9:29 AM on May 3, 2009

Need more movies. Heh. I doubt if my girlfriend has seen any of those. Throw in a couple classics, and I think you're set.
posted by cjorgensen at 9:51 AM on May 3, 2009

Feel free to suggest! A few thoughts I've had are:

1) has to be pretty widely known, obviously.
2) should be something where it's easy to gauge where in the movie you are. For instance, a movie where the character ages over the film like Citizen Kane, or slowly transforms like The Fly.
3) i should have a few from different eras to represent a wide variety of ages.

Big Lebowski got a pass on those, because it's the Big Lebowski.
posted by condour75 at 10:03 AM on May 3, 2009

Casablanca. :)
posted by cjorgensen at 10:26 AM on May 3, 2009

Mapping seconds to days for a movie that is less than two hours long. That's a little too mortal for my taste!

but...awesome!
posted by puckish at 7:39 PM on May 3, 2009

Sweet, I can choose to live for 3000 years. Thanks for the extension!
posted by Burhanistan at 9:45 PM on May 3, 2009 [1 favorite]

It would be fun to do this someday with Benjamin Button. The younger he is, the older you are.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 12:40 AM on May 4, 2009

Just added "It's a Wonderful Life." Thinking of doing 2001: A Space Odyssey (am I on the Jupiter mission yet?) and maybe Bladerunner. (I don't have a copy of Casablanca, cjorgensen, crazy as that seems) Burhanistan: I thought of popping up a dialogue box for insane lifespans, but figured what the hell. It will make you dead if your lifespan is shorter than the time between now and your birthday, though.

(hehe I thought about Benjamin Button, but... nah.)
posted by condour75 at 6:54 AM on May 4, 2009

Add When Harry Met Sally. The characters change over time (hairstyle, dress, etc.) and tons of people know that movie by heart.
posted by ocherdraco at 12:56 PM on May 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

How about the Lord of the Rings trilogy?
posted by SpacemanStix at 11:19 AM on May 6, 2009

This is neat. my only nitpick is that it's hard with some of the films to figure out where you are from just one frame.
posted by lunasol at 10:47 PM on May 9, 2009

Yeah it would probably be a ton of work, but it would be awesome if it knew what was happening during different parts of the movie. Like, with a short text description under the picture. A pretty significant number of the individual frames are probably meaningless on their own.

The Dude has been thrown in the back of a limo. He is concerned about his beverage.

I'm sure plenty of us would be into helping you annotate these if you wanted to tackle it.

Also, maybe Fight Club would be good for this -- everybody seems to know it, you can judge how far along you are from how fucked up Edward Norton's face is, and it'd be like a bonus if you landed on one of the 'blip' frames.
posted by churl at 4:21 PM on May 15, 2009

Pretty neat. I'm currently explaining to the Dread Pirate Roberts my psychological contortions concerning the poisoned drink, and I've recently unearthed the monolith on the moon.

I too like the design. Also, that calculator you've linked to is pretty intense.
posted by philomathoholic at 7:06 PM on May 23, 2009

Oh, I meant to give a suggestion too. It's something that would also be quite difficult, but if you could link to the relevant clip on youtube, that'd be pretty neat. For example, mine would be the clip of the scene with the switching poison.
posted by philomathoholic at 7:07 PM on May 23, 2009