7 ms·

Ordering movie credits with graph theory

210 points by sigil 5y ago

scubbo 5y ago
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.
- ridaj 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  I thought most of that was in the union contracts.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  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.
zestyping 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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.
    - qw 5y ago
      As students, they probably have limited insights into what a role is worth. With this tool they can base it on data generated by the industry and get a fair starting point.
- Zababa 5y ago
  > 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/ https://endcrawl.com/template/
  - raihansaputra 5y ago
    What's more interesting that Endcrawl actually started with the process of sending over an Excel file over email. Seems like they already got their main use (no the editor/graphic/motion don't want to spend an hour trying to change 1 name) and keep finding ways to improve credit-making.
adrianmonk 5y ago
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.
- dylan604 5y ago
  (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 5y ago
    Where I stated "above the fold", that totally should be "above the line". This isn't a newspaper. DOH!
88 5y ago
Surely the order of movie credits is a political decision, not a technical one?
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    "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.
- dkonofalski 5y ago
  Definitely. For most on-screen talent, part of the ordering is even contractual. I think this was more of a fun exercise to see if they could come up with a model for how that political process averages out to create a technical one.
bigmattystyles 5y ago
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.
- xmprt 5y ago
  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.
  - wingmanjd 5y ago
    I had no idea this was the reason! It always annoyed me when they didn't match.
  - smegsicle 5y ago
    antiquated? what changed?
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      Probably for one thing the relative importance of the marquee vs standalone posters.
- lesuorac 5y ago
  Top Billing is the term to learn more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billing_(performing_arts)#Top_and_above-title_billing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billing_(performing_arts)#Top_...
- goto11 5y ago
  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.
- 5y ago
dahfizz 5y ago
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 5y ago
  I didn't even notice until you had pointed it out and now I hate it. Thanks for that.
- fudged71 5y ago
  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 ;)
  - themadturk 5y ago
    It's a testament to how long it's been since I've been in a movie theater, but I was thinking "What about scrubbing to the end?" Oops, can't do that on the silver screen!
ridaj 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - ridaj 5y ago
    Yes, the solution sounds excellent if we take that premise at face value, but I do wonder about the premise.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
sfink 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 https://endcrawl.com/credits-ordering/#fn:permutation-search
citizenpaul 5y ago
What is the abomination of a webpage that removes the scroll bar? Pass.
forrestthewoods 5y ago
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?
glitcher 5y ago
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 5y ago
  IMDb Pro does a very good job of this. But you do need the subscription.
fudged71 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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-description-requirements/ http://9001quality.com/iso-9001-organizational-structure-job...
LeonardoTolstoy 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Ordering by appearance also seems to be common.
  - patal 5y ago
    I think of Black Adder here, where the credits ordering is different in every episode. In one episode it's ordering by disappearance, in another it's by precedence in the royal lineage, in another it's by Geographical Order, and so on. This is in the first season.
noxvilleza 5y ago
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.
ouid 5y ago
credit position is an incentive that costs employers nothing, so of course it's optimized way beyond sanity.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Once you get past the major names and into the scroll, the text usually moves from the bottom of the screen upwards. This works naturally with the way we read English. But I've seen at least one movie do it in reverse with the text moving downwards. I thought it was the original 'Repo Man' but the only instance of those end credits I can find on YouTube seems to indicate that's not it. Whatever movie did it, it makes me wonder if the screen could simply be split in two, with major credits scrolling upwards on the left half and more minor roles scrolling downwards on the right half, perhaps at a different speed. Major stars, directors, producers, etc. would still get their full screen credits before the scrolling started. Deciding who ends up on with side of the screen would of course be another complication.
- isleyaardvark 5y ago
  I just checked my copy of the Criterion Collection version of Repo Man and the credits do go in reverse, moving downward. (I also saw it not too long ago in a theater and remembered it going in reverse, for what that's worth.)
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Thanks. Apparently, AMC changed the credits scroll when they broadcast it so they could put ads on the screen at the same time.
tomcam 5y ago
Finally, Balloon Technician David Thurlow gets his due. It’s high time. His work in 2014’s “Freedom” stands out, according to most ballon technicians

210 points by sigil 5y ago

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.

ridaj 5y ago
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 5y ago
I thought most of that was in the union contracts.
egypturnash 5y ago
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.

zestyping 5y ago

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 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  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.
  - qw 5y ago
    As students, they probably have limited insights into what a role is worth. With this tool they can base it on data generated by the industry and get a fair starting point.
Zababa 5y ago
> 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/ https://endcrawl.com/template/
- raihansaputra 5y ago
  What's more interesting that Endcrawl actually started with the process of sending over an Excel file over email. Seems like they already got their main use (no the editor/graphic/motion don't want to spend an hour trying to change 1 name) and keep finding ways to improve credit-making.

adrianmonk 5y ago

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.

dylan604 5y ago
(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 5y ago
  Where I stated "above the fold", that totally should be "above the line". This isn't a newspaper. DOH!

88 5y ago

Surely the order of movie credits is a political decision, not a technical one?

beaconstudios 5y ago
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 5y ago
  "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.
dkonofalski 5y ago
Definitely. For most on-screen talent, part of the ordering is even contractual. I think this was more of a fun exercise to see if they could come up with a model for how that political process averages out to create a technical one.

bigmattystyles 5y ago

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.

xmprt 5y ago
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.
- wingmanjd 5y ago
  I had no idea this was the reason! It always annoyed me when they didn't match.
- smegsicle 5y ago
  antiquated? what changed?
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    Probably for one thing the relative importance of the marquee vs standalone posters.
lesuorac 5y ago
Top Billing is the term to learn more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billing_(performing_arts)#Top_and_above-title_billing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billing_(performing_arts)#Top_...
goto11 5y ago
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.
5y ago

dahfizz 5y ago

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 5y ago
I didn't even notice until you had pointed it out and now I hate it. Thanks for that.
fudged71 5y ago
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 ;)
- themadturk 5y ago
  It's a testament to how long it's been since I've been in a movie theater, but I was thinking "What about scrubbing to the end?" Oops, can't do that on the silver screen!

ridaj 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.
- ridaj 5y ago
  Yes, the solution sounds excellent if we take that premise at face value, but I do wonder about the premise.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

sfink 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 https://endcrawl.com/credits-ordering/#fn:permutation-search

citizenpaul 5y ago

What is the abomination of a webpage that removes the scroll bar? Pass.

forrestthewoods 5y ago

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?

glitcher 5y ago

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 5y ago
IMDb Pro does a very good job of this. But you do need the subscription.

fudged71 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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-description-requirements/ http://9001quality.com/iso-9001-organizational-structure-job...

LeonardoTolstoy 5y ago

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 5y ago
Ordering by appearance also seems to be common.
- patal 5y ago
  I think of Black Adder here, where the credits ordering is different in every episode. In one episode it's ordering by disappearance, in another it's by precedence in the royal lineage, in another it's by Geographical Order, and so on. This is in the first season.

noxvilleza 5y ago

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.

ouid 5y ago

credit position is an incentive that costs employers nothing, so of course it's optimized way beyond sanity.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

Once you get past the major names and into the scroll, the text usually moves from the bottom of the screen upwards. This works naturally with the way we read English. But I've seen at least one movie do it in reverse with the text moving downwards. I thought it was the original 'Repo Man' but the only instance of those end credits I can find on YouTube seems to indicate that's not it. Whatever movie did it, it makes me wonder if the screen could simply be split in two, with major credits scrolling upwards on the left half and more minor roles scrolling downwards on the right half, perhaps at a different speed. Major stars, directors, producers, etc. would still get their full screen credits before the scrolling started. Deciding who ends up on with side of the screen would of course be another complication.

isleyaardvark 5y ago
I just checked my copy of the Criterion Collection version of Repo Man and the credits do go in reverse, moving downward. (I also saw it not too long ago in a theater and remembered it going in reverse, for what that's worth.)
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Thanks. Apparently, AMC changed the credits scroll when they broadcast it so they could put ads on the screen at the same time.

tomcam 5y ago

Finally, Balloon Technician David Thurlow gets his due. It’s high time. His work in 2014’s “Freedom” stands out, according to most ballon technicians