Flim is the Thing

February 28, 2021 3:05 AM

Flim is a movie search engine currently in beta that returns screenshots from movies based on keywords. [Via Kottke & Boing Boing & Recomendo]
posted by chavenet (16 comments total)

I cannot favourite this enough. I've mentioned elsewhere on metafilter that I'm collecting occurrences of wind turbines in film, this just found about half a dozen I didn't know about, which is my usual tally for a year. I'm finally planning and writing papers so good to soak up a few more. Interesting to see the algorithm throw up a few.alternatives, e.g. rogue one for the obvious 'not a wind turbine' object.
posted by biffa at 4:17 AM on February 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

It's also an Aphex Twin song
posted by kfholy at 4:43 AM on February 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

I’ll register later. I was in the middle of typing “A train shall carry a corpse by express” when it threw up a modal window telling me I had used all my free searches for today. I do hope they flesh this out, as it could be fun.
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:18 AM on February 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

Ha! I actually built something similar a fortnight ago, but for Adam Curtis: But This Was A Fantasy (I've only done two series so far, mind you).
posted by carsondial at 6:21 AM on February 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is very cool!

I wish it included subtitles. I want to be able to search for "This is no time to panic", or "Prepare to die", or "We want the finest wines available to humanity" for example, and have it pull up stills from movies where that line appears. It would be really useful for making supercuts.
posted by oulipian at 7:23 AM on February 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

Yarn has subtitles.
posted by Ideefixe at 7:32 AM on February 28, 2021 [6 favorites]

Oh that is so great! Thank you!!!!
posted by oulipian at 7:37 AM on February 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

It needs some tuning - I searched for “fifth element hair” and did not see any pictures of Ruby Rhod. Love this concept though! It is hard to find moments from movies without watching the darn movie, and currently my perception is that the state of the art is to look on YouTube and hope someone made a video of the scene you were imagining and also hope it wasn’t deleted for copyright reasons.
posted by oceanjesse at 9:10 AM on February 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

I was really hoping that my search for "the what?" would return the shot I was thinking of, but alas. (It's literally the first result on Google, even with the misquote.) Confusingly, "the" seems to make the program think I want scenes with U.S. flags in them.
posted by ob1quixote at 10:34 AM on February 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

And if you're talking about a scifi film with outstanding practical effects, The Thing is the film.
posted by Splunge at 10:47 AM on February 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

No results for "Jew", "Jewish", "Israel" (except as a first name). I suspect that there's an editorial decision here that's going to cause problems: I couldn't even find results for "torah" or "Moses" ( think: Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. Then I looked for "ark", and could only find it as part of that movie's title.

Antisemitism produced by AI working off crowdsourced corpuses is a big problem, but invisibility isn't going to work either.
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:05 AM on February 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

I think it might just be using a generic visual recognition network trained on objects. I did not get good results for anything abstract. I got cool results with things like "clock" though.

If you run into the daily limit just copy paste your queries tomorrow, it seems to initiate a full query on every typed character.
posted by haemanu at 12:17 PM on February 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

"Get to the chopper" fail.
posted by kirkaracha at 1:06 PM on February 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think it might just be using a generic visual recognition network trained on objects.

It's not as granular as it might be. Lots of hits for "bird", but only one bird-related hit for "sparrow", two for "robin", and none at all for "tit" or "booby". I guess they haven't processed many nature documentaries.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:01 PM on February 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

"I got cool results with things like "clock" though."

Reminds me instantly of this.

EDIT: aaaand I see it's already mentioned in the FPP, lol.
posted by storybored at 4:52 PM on February 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

Wow cheers. And I'd only just found out about Shotdeck which is essentially the same service (also gratis) - so now there is double the fun.
posted by Shatner's Bassoon at 7:14 AM on March 3, 2021