“This is the answer to the tyranny of choice. Curation of your film choice based on feelings—a huge help after a long day. Brilliant idea, and the design effectively serves that idea.” —juror Keri Elmsly
“The focus on an emotional state to align users to a movie is unique, interesting and piques a level of curiosity toward titles I was not familiar with.” — juror Harold Jones
Overview: Genres are out. Feelings are in. FEELM is a crowd-powered film discovery platform created by a community of movie lovers that changes the way we search for movies. An elegantly designed scrolling feature on the homepage invites users to finish the sentence “I feel like,” prompting them to explore movie titles with phrases like “believing in love,” “breaking the rules” and “emptying a box of tissues.” Then, in one place, FEELM gives you everything you need to decide what you feel like watching: a synopsis, a trailer link, reviews and direct links to find the film on multiple platforms, from iTunes to Netflix.
•Twelve people from Portland, Oregon–based digital firm Red & Co. worked on FEELM.
•Red & Co. used Meteor for the web and mobile application framework, MongoDB to store data, and Swift for FEELM’s Apple TV app.
•The site has received 1 million visitors since launch.
Comments by Mira Kaddoura, Red & Co.’s founder, and Marco Murillo, executive interactive producer at Red & Co.:
Did you use any applications that you hadn’t used before? “This was the first time we’ve developed an app for Apple TV. We chose to use Meteor for our application framework because it enabled us to reuse many components on web and mobile devices. But Meteor can’t yet build for Apple TV, so we were forced to write the app in Apple’s Xcode, Swift and the TVMLKit JS library. We had to come up with a way to keep Apple TV updated with all the latest films, so we created an internal application program interface that the app uses to pull in fresh data every time it’s loaded.”
Are there any special navigation features? “The ability to scroll endlessly through all of the feelings. Once you reach the end, it will loop around to the beginning. Selecting a feeling and then a film presents a detail page with links to stream the trailer to your device, get a collection of services to watch the film now, share the film on social media and add the film to a list so you can watch it later. Each of the Watch Now services links directly to the provider, so the experience is seamless. The share button generates a phrase that tells others how you’re feeling as well as which film you’re watching. The Add to List button synchronizes your list from the app to the web, so you can view it no matter which device you’re using.”
Were there any specific demands that made the project easier or harder? “FEELM is on iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and the web. We wanted to streamline the development process by reusing components on all devices. This presented challenges, as we would build components for the web that wouldn’t work the way we wanted on mobile. It took a lot of finesse and trial and error to create a consistent experience. Getting the scroller to feel right was difficult: the scroller accepts mouse scroll wheel, touch and keyboard input all at once. Devices make assumptions about event parameters, leading to some funny situations when you forget to normalize that data.”
