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“Heroes vs. Villains” – An Exclusive New Flickchart Poster & Shirt Design by Artist, Brandon Schaefer

30, Dec 2010
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We at Flickchart have been wanting to do t-shirts and posters for some time, but we also wanted to have something creative, special, and unique. To achieve this, we put our feelers out to some of our favorite artists to find someone who could come up with their own visual spin on what Flickchart’s all about. Our search led us to designer, illustrator, and artist – Brandon Schaefer.

You may have seen some of Brandon’s work elsewhere on the web, and even associated with many of the movies on Flickchart. Here’s a taste of some of the other great work Brandon has done:

Brandon took the essence of Flickchart and devised this new work – “Heroes vs. Villains” – which pits some of cinema’s most iconic good guys against evil in a fight to the finish. Ray Stantz vs. Chucky. Robocop vs. Hannibal Lecter. Batman vs. Jason. Marty McFly vs. The Terminator. Who will win?

This design is available as both an affordable museum-quality poster print and a custom t-shirt – both in a variety of shapes and sizes. If you have some extra cash from the holidays burning a hole in your pocket, now’s your chance to show your support and grab one of these. Have a happy new year and let us know what you think!

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Buy a Flickchart Poster Print ►

70,000 Flickcharters Pick Their Top 20 of 2010

29, Dec 2010
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During 2010, we received over 49 million rankings where movie fans have been placing new films from the year onto their lists and putting them up against the best movies of all time. This list culminates those rankings to generate the movies of 2010 that are highest ranked by all of the users of Flickchart. This list is only accurate up to the day this was published, so if you’re eager to see if things have changed, you can check the daily results at http://www.flickchart.com/charts/2010.

Don’t forget too that once you’re there, you can further filter the list to get the best of 2010 combined with any of your favorite actors or genres. Best animated movies of 2010? Check. Best Jonah Hill movies of 2010? Check. Best animated movies starring Jonah Hill of 2010? Check.

While there certainly may be some debate on what made the cut and where each film landed on the list that may not line up with your personal best of 2010, we’re surprised and interested to see such a wide variety of blockbusters, indie films, animated, documentary, comedy, sci-fi, and action make their presence this year. We’ve been making strides to improve the global rankings to be as accurate as possible, and we’ll have even more innovations on this front in the new year – along with a laundry list of new features we’ve got cooked up.

Remember, if you watched and ranked these movies on your Flickchart, you helped to create this list! If not, be sure to rank your favorites of 2010 to influence the list for the future! Without further adieu, here are your Top 20 of 2010:

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A Maintenance Update

31, Oct 2010
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Just wanted to let everyone know that we’ve found one of the biggest culprits in our speed issues. We found that there are 207 damaged sectors on one of the hard drives used on our servers, but we’re still awaiting replacement from our hosting services (unfortunately the weekend is not the quickest time to get a speedy response). While this is not the only issue slowing things down, it’s likely a huge portion of it.

The site’s back up now, but it will still have some sluggishness and slowness until we can get the drive swapped. We really appreciate your patience as we work through these issues and get Flickchart running at tip-top shape for you.

Until then, our apologies for any lag, time outs, or slowness you may experience. We’ll let you know more as it happens. Thanks, everyone.

UPDATE: At 2:21 pm Eastern, we pulled the site back down into maintenance mode so we can get a replacement drive in place on our server. Hang tight.

UPDATE: At 10 pm Eastern, we’re back up. Speeds should hopefully be better now. We still have some more bugs to fix, but things should be relatively smoother now in terms of performance.

A Year (And Then Some) Of Flickcharting

29, Oct 2010
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Boy, how time flies when you’re ranking movies…

We’ve Been Hard At Work

We really feel like we’ve accomplished a great deal since the unveiling of Flickchart to the public just over a year ago. We expanded our integrations with services like Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix. We added many enhancements to our charts pages, the ability for users to assist us in adding new movies to the site, and new ranking filters such as “By Actor” and “By Director”. We introduced more ways to see what your friends think of your favorite movies, more ways to dive into recent matchup discussions, and the ability to see all the latest movie additions to be ranked. We most recently added a way to finally purchase some of the awesome posters you come across, more information about what your friends are up to on Flickchart, and even keyboard shortcuts for the hardcore users!

The Blog Is Bigger, Better, and Badassss!

Beyond the confines of Flickchart itself, we also took our blog to the next level to include over 200 posts of amazing things over the past year. With a call-out to you, our users, we received an incredible amount of unique, well-written articles which we’ve turned into our User Showcase. It features some really talented writers detailing topics like the addiction of Flickchart, to the tumultuousness of your Top 20′s, to the enlightenment that might be reached from listening to your inner critic. We had a great addition of the popular “Reel Rumbles“ pioneered by Aric Mitchell - putting a spotlight on some of the most debated film duels in an elaborate, enlightening way that made you think twice about the best films. And to top it all off, we were delighted to bring on-board two Flickchart-obsessed movie lovers – Travis Betz and Devin Barry – who have delivered 37 episodes of the most entertaining movie battle show to ever hit the interwebs – our official podcast, Flick Fights!

It All Adds Up To This

In addition to all that – we’ve grown in numbers too. When we started a year ago, we had an incredibly helpful & informative group of around 20,000 private beta testers preparing us for our public launch. Now, we’re proud to have a membership of well over 62,000 – more than tripling the amount of addicted movie lovers from where we started.

But by far, the most staggering statistic is just how many times you’ve all been ranking movies. As of right now, there have been over 101,724,879 matchups served. 101 million! That’s simply astounding.

But Wait… That’s Not All!

We’ve been so excited to see all of you really enjoying your time spent with us, so we wanted to celebrate by giving something back to you for all your help in getting us to where we are today. Here’s a rundown of our latest features available now – on Flickchart:

Rank By Title

We’re very happy to announce that we’ve redesigned our system of ranking a single selected film so that you no longer go to a separate page and rank it only three times. Now, the new method of choosing a film to rank is through a new filter called “By Title”. When you select a film from a movie’s information page, from your unseen list (the list of shame!), or from one of the charts, it takes you to the main ranking page and pits the film against other movies on your list systematically until it reaches its appropriate spot on your list.

There’s also a progress bar to visually show you approximately how many rankings you have left until the movie has settled into its correct ranking. After reaching the goal with the movie in its final position, you’re also presented with an opportunity to share the movie’s place on your list via Twitter and Facebook with your friends.

This is now the perfect way to add a new movie you’ve seen to your list, re-rank a movie to get it out of your Top 20, get a movie to move up or down your list quickly, or simply revisit a movie and see if its relative position has changed over the lifespan of ranking movies on Flickchart. We’ve worked really hard to make this new filter fun, effective, and efficient for all of you, so please let us know what you think of it!

Rank By Franchise

While ranking apples and oranges can be a lot of fun, extremely enlightening, and mentally challenging – there’s also something to be said for simply hitting up your favorite movie series, film characters, and collections of cinema and letting them battle it out. Enter our latest filter – By Franchise – which presents a hand-picked group of over 100 movie franchises for your ranking pleasure.

Rank all your favorite movies from the Star Wars or Star Trek universes. See what your favorite Monty Python comedy is. How many Friday the 13th films are there, and where do they all rank for you?

This filter is also available on the Charts page – so you can filter any combination of year, decade, actor, director, genre, and more with the franchises however you like. For example. you could look at your rankings for National Lampoon movies only starring Chevy Chase. See just Nightmare on Elm St. films from the 80s. Review only the James Bond movies with Sean Connery in the role. The possibilities are endless – and at your disposal.

New Movie Page Redesign

There’s a fresh coat of paint on our movie pages! We’ve put together a new layout that showcases more information about your favorite films than ever before. The biggest new addition is the ability to see at a glance the most popular and recent discussions for any movie. Pull up the best films from your Flickchart and see which movies are going up against it and debated the most amongst other Flickcharters. It’s a great way to find other people who’ve rallied behind the films you like the most and a gateway for you to join the fights and make your voices heard!

You can also now leave comments for just a single movie, reply to other comments, and “like” the best comments. Two other new elements to the page are trailers and other videos from YouTube for each movie, and the latest updates from Twitter to see what other people are saying recently about the movies you’re interested in.

On top of all that, you can now easily let your friends know where a movie rests on your list and bring the discussion to Twitter and Facebook via Tweet and Share buttons at the top, where you can share your ranking for that movie with your friends at any time. We think this new layout provides a wealth of new ways to look at your movies and find new paths to learn more about them on Flickchart. Please let us know what you think of all the changes to the movie pages and what else you’d like to see for them in the future.

We also managed to squash a few long-standing bugs too:

  • The infamous “winner drops a place” bug is fixed!
  • Searching for movies with special characters now returns expected results (For example, “Amelie” will now properly return “Amélie“)
  • There’s now support for alternate/foreign titles (For example, searching for “The Boat” will return “Das Boot” as a result) – this will improve as we add more known alternate titles to our database
  • Certain movies that were without posters should now able to be ranked without giving an error
  • You should see a wider variety of movies in all filters – you should no longer see any constraints on which films come up in a given filter
  • and many other performance, visual, and programming-based enhancements throughout the site

Again, we want to thank each and every one of you for becoming a part of the Flickchart family and discovering more about your favorite movies. All of the unbelievable amount of support, feedback, and dedication are the reasons we love working on Flickchart, and it means so much to us to know that you’re getting just as much out of it as we’ve put into it. As always, there’s plenty more in store for the site in the future – so stay tuned. You never know what we might reveal next!

Flickchart Features: New Indie Horror Film, “So Falls The Shadow”

29, Apr 2010
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One of our longtime users, Abe Moran (“waveofmutilation” on Flickchart), asked us to take a look at a new venture he’s undertaking as associate producer on an independent feature film called “So Falls The Shadow”. The creators’ goal of the film is to create a more realistic lycanthropic horror story that sharply contrasts the empty and emotionless trend of vampire films that have recently gained favor. Less Twilight, more Let the Right One In - but for werewolves.

The story’s set in the deep south of Tennessee – where a pastor of a small town tries to justify a rash of killings as the will of God, but slowly comes to a more personal realization as his hurried investigation reveals his worst fears and immeasurable loss. Here’s a first look at their proof-of-concept teaser trailer:

If your interest is piqued, you can follow the film’s progress on Facebook and Twitter. We’re told the creators of the film have some high-level studio execs keeping a close eye on them after hitting some industry meetups, but that they’re looking to the online community to keep the buzz strong as they acquire funding and a distributor for the picture.

With microbudget genre films getting further exposure through direct rentals and purchases online (via Netflix, and other on-demand video services) small films from young filmmakers, like “So Falls The Shadow”, have a real shot at a larger audience – with your support.

How To Refashion Your Flickchart Rankings As Ratings

13, Apr 2010
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When Jeremy and I came up with the concept for Flickchart, one of the biggest catalysts was that we felt like ratings were never quite good enough to truly describe how much we liked a film using some sort of numerical value. With only 4 or 5 stars, there just wasn’t enough nuance to differentiate from movie to movie. But what about 1-100 scales? Or 10 stars? It was just too arbitrary to pick a value in the middle somewhere, and say concretely that we liked a film exactly 7.7 out of 10, or 64 out of 100. What could we actually point to within ourselves to say that one movie was a 65 out of 100 instead of a 64 out of 100. It just seems too hard to quantify when judging a single movie’s merits on their own, and coming up with a value that represents one’s honest opinion. The rest, as they say, is history…

That being said, we know there are a lot of people that are justifiably more used to the idea of rating movies instead of ranking them. It’s no wonder, as we’ve been doing it reportedly since July 31, 1928 when New York Daily News critic, Irene Thirer (PDF link) , awarded “The Port of Missing Girls” one star. (Read more about the origins of star ratings at The Critical Numbers and Let’s Rate the Ranking Systems of Film Reviews – both from Carl Bialik, aka “The Numbers Guy”, of The Wall Street Journal.)

So if you’ve come from a long lineage of rating movies with stars (and let’s face it – we all have), here’s a little exercise to explain how you might reorient your Flickchart rankings and extrapolate them back to just simple ratings – using a few films from my list as examples.

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