Actors & Crew members – the salt and pepper in the art of film making
I always wondered why actors and crew members do not get the attention they deserve. Over their life span, most people develop emotions on certain actors/actresses and/or other creative people in the film making industry – like directors or camara operators. Everyone can easily name their personal favorites and actors they want to avoid watching in a movie.
Plex shows actors together with their roles and nice images on each TV show and movie detail page. Plex can filter for actors and certain other crew members and on certain smart hubs show movies for featured artists.
All of this is fine – there’s nothing wrong with that.
But user experience based upon actors / crew members is not very good currently.
Current State of Affairs
If I want to watch a movie which features one of my favorite actors/actresses, I need to either …
… remember a movie in a library which qualifies,
… possibly clicking on another movie, show that movie’s details, then clicking on my favorite actor/actress, showing that person’s list of movies inside the same library (not workable on all platforms),
… hope that one of the hubs contains info that matches my current wish,
… use the library filter mechanism, which is not quick on Plex Web, but can be a real hassle on other player platforms (iOS, Android, etc.),
… having set up smart collections or smart playlists by – again – using the same library filter mechanism mentioned above plus having saved the result of that filter,
… using Plex Web top level search to type in the name of an actor and scroll through the results – not very usable on systems without a keyboard.
… using Plex for Alexa trying to spare me from typing).
Movie Lover’s current way of doing it
Throughout my life, I developed a growing list of actors and directors that I want “to follow”. Hidden away in my large movie libraries, I may or may not be able to find all those pearls. At the moment, I couldn’t even remember the name of that Russian director, whose movies I once grabbed when they were available, but did not find the time to watch yet.
Not always, but from time to time, I want to just be entertained by one of those old “Laurel & Hardy” short movies – or one of those Denzel Washington movies that I found cool when watching them the first time.
Or maybe, It’s finally the time to make my mind up about one of Andrei Tarkovsky’s (see, I checked his name) old Russian movies.
I want a central “landing page” for actors and/or for crew (per library at least) when I get into that “following mode” described above – where all my favorites are one scroll and click away.
I was very happy when Plex introduced “Smart playlists” and “Smart Collections” to PMS – since both would allow me and one-time configuration for this and I would never have to care again.
First, I had to make my mind up on which of those two concepts I prefer, since I already were using both features. Collections are auto-generated using TheMovieDB info – and I am generally very happy with that. Plus, I used playlists for a more genre-mode access to my big libraries. For example, I have a playlist for all unwatched “Spy movies”, for all unwatched “DC universe movies”, etc… which is also very cool for my use case.
For most collections (used for real movie collections like all James Bond movies, for the Insidious series, etc), I want collection posters, I add descriptions manually.
For all playlists, I do not need this (I don’t need a poster or description for all unwatched spy movies).
Therefore, I can live with the quadratic image of playlists while my collections really need that poster-format image.
On ThePosterDB, I found really cool poster images for actors and crews… (guys, if you are reading this: I LOVE YOUR POSTERS). IMDB has fine short intro texts for most important actors and directors, so I decided to go with smart collection for actors and crew.
Currently, such a smart collection looks like this.
Since collections also have age rating and labels, I also use them where I see fitting.
To enable you (the audience) to compage the look and feel of a collection with that of a smart playlist, I created also such a smart playlist with the same content. I hope you understand, why I went with smart collections.
There’s one huge disadvantage of any of those use cases:
I you have already filled collection pages and playlist pages with other stuff, adding actor and crew playlists render those collection and playlist pages quite crowded and makes them less usable.
My main movie library has already more than 100 collections (again, auto-filled by TheMovieDB) and my PlayList page contains more than fifty playlists – without any actor and director page.
Adding about fifty or one hundred of further collections for actors/crew results in less usability.
Movie Lover’s Wish List (call it a feature wish if you like):
How would I handle those actor and crew member pages if I were a Plex developer?
Well, I would just add two more library tabs (to the existing Suggestion, Library, Collection, Playlist tabs) for each library:
On these tabs, I would show a search field (for actors in the actor tab, for the different crew positions on the crew page – typing a name in the respective search field automatically created an “Actor Smart Collection” (or “Crew Smart Collection” respectively) which only populates the Actor tab (or the Crew tab respectively) – and does not populate the main collection tab.
If somebody wants to use the main collection tab for this, he or she can easily use the already existing filters to create them.
ThePostDB is already working on API access to their database (which would be real nice to have BTW), but at the moment, you could populate that poster with some variant of the actor image you already got.
If you can auto-grab IMDB or Wikipedia info on actors/crew smart collections for a description, this would be really cool also.
Why do not auto-generate collections for any actor / crew member once a movie is added to a collection?
While it would not require any user interaction, it would also mean thousands of collections on large libraries and hundreds of collection on smaller libraries – most of them never being used.
Therefore, I would be happy to have a clean “landing page” with only the collection I decide to have.
One addition that could be opted for:
Always have the top-10-featured artists / crew members in any library auto-generated.
