One year ago on September 17, IndiePix introduced the Discovery Engine at an event at the British Film Institute. One month later, at a series of meetings in San Jose and San Francisco, we delivered essentially the same presentation. This month, as Discovery Engine turns one-year-old, the continuing effort to tackle the most challenging problem in independent film continues apace.

Isn’t it interesting that “gurus” complain about “too many films”? Let’s not point the finger, but you’ve read it several places recently. “There are too many films being made and distributed!” That is such a silly, self-serving statement (what? we should only distribute your films?) and it’s so obviously not what’s happening (with the explosion of production technologies and new talent) that we dismiss the cry easily. But there is a problem: film fans who want to find something interesting and filmmakers who want to be found need some way to find each other!

Why not Recommend? “Recommendation Engines” are very popular, starting with the best of them all at NetFlix. However, they all work on the premise, implemented differently in different systems, that you will like what other people who are like you like. In short, it’s a popularity contest. And while in some individual circumstances to the individual user it can feel like an expansion of choices, in the aggregate choices are narrowed in the way you’d expect popularity contests to narrow selection. You can find a summary of the technical article here: Reinforcing the Blockbuster Nature of Media.

Discovery! Expands Choices. Starting with the Focus Title (which you choose), Discovery! shows you 7 paths you can explore starting with that title. Each path has 2 films, for a total of 14 films that relate to the Focus Title according to the themes and characteristics of that title. The first row of titles (in magenta) embody the path theme and are more closely related to the Focus Title; they are numbered from 1 to 7. The second row of titles (in lime), numbered from 8 to 14, are on the path but somewhat more “distant” from the focus title than the higher ranked magenta colors. In all, from a starting point, we present you 7 themes and 14 titles to explore.

Discovery! In Action. So here on a rainy, Labor Day Weekend, Saturday afternoon, let’s start this example with Rain. Since this is my example (and we’ll talk about how many examples there could be), I’m interested in something about “rain”. Discovery! shows me 7 paths related to Rain, all themes that are prominently represented in our catalog of over 3,200 titles. The idea of “rain” and “Masai” is intriguing, just because I can’t imagine it very well, and I choose that one to see what happens. That film was in position 2 on Screen 1. The presentation transitions to Screen 2, and “Masai” is the focus title, and 7 news themes and 14 new titles are presented for my consideration. One of those titles, in the back row in position 12 has got a great title. If you mouse-over the cover art, you can see the entire title in a pop-up box. The title is “Last Day of a Rainy Summer” and it’s one of two short films from a Russian director on this disc. I can click on the “More Informtion” button and read that this film was shot on a collective farm in the late 1970’s, and I can proceed to order it to be sent to me.

I started with a vague sense of where I am today and got to something I did not know about, something that I think sounds both interesting and artistic. I’m very happy with this Discovery!

How My Choices Were Expanded. In this example, we went through 3 screens, and on each screen there were 14 different choices. That means that I had 14 times 14 times 14 different choices presented to me. Or, to put it another way, there were 2,744 – 1 other choices that I could have made. Discovery! didn’t narrow my choices. It vastly expanded them and introduced me to titles I could choose from based on my interests.

Two Short Technical Notes. This system will deliver richer and richer results the larger the catalog gets. Over the last year, we have added more than 1,000 films to the catalog and we can see — and in our development work, we can quantify — the increasing depth of choice Discovery! is creating.

The second point is that while this system does use the idea of “tags”, which are used in every blog for example, we do not assign tags to the films. The tags are assigned by the Discovery! system based on its analysis of the synopsis of each film in our catalog. This summer, we rewrote about 500 synopses, and we can see how a more complete and thoughtful synopsis makes this system work better. But that’s what we do! We like independent films, and we want to make sure that they have the best write ups we can deliver. The system can take it from there.

Progress Is Important. We believe we have made good progress with Discovery! over the last year, but we also know that this is an evolutionary process and there is more work to be done to perfect this system. Try it out and send us your thoughts! You can access Discovery! directly on our site at http://www.indiepixfilms.com/discovery