Better handling of film productions

[philosophicles]

This is a bit of a placeholder/discussion one - perhaps slightly related to #159 but not much. I don't think there's already an issue for this...

Camdram's schema and UI were designed mainly with live-performance productions in mind, i.e. "stage shows".

We are however also used to list film productions on a regular basis - small volume of 'shows' created but fairly consistent (rising even?). Also occasionally radio plays. As far as I'm aware the consensus of current web support people is that these intersect closely enough with stage shows to be perfectly 'allowable'. (Rule of thumb being "are the roles / production needs similar to stage shows?")

However the wording on the 'Add show' screen, and possibly other parts of the site, are inherently very geared towards stage shows. E.g. films don't have "performance dates", they have a rehearsal period (OK stage shows have that too), a shooting period, and perhaps a release date.

Should we try to adapt the wording to be more generic, or create separate "Add Film" screens etc, or something else, or nothing?

[hoyes]

I would argue for keeping Camdram's focus unapologetically on serving the 'Cambridge student theatre community', but to openly accept vacancy adverts for things that aren't staged shows (i.e. without having to first creating a 'show'), where they're likely to be of significant interest to people who have signed up to hear about theatre-related vacancies. Such ads would have to be moderated by admins before publishing in keeping with shows without a society/venue. The specifics of the piece of art in question could just be written free-form in the body of the ad.

I suspect a certain proportion of shows are only created in order to post vacancy ads, which I'd say is good for Camdram as it means we get a very complete record of Camdram drama in return. So I wonder whether such a form should either only be usable for non-shows, or the form should require you to enter show details too where relevant, to avoid losing this.

Again, I think this would have to be bundled (along with a growing list of other things) with #159...

[philosophicles]

Yes, I like that angle - and yes, this would definitely involve schema change so is a long way off. :)

[GKFX]

I think this is quite an important feature for Camdram to have; student film is kind of sidelined at the moment. As film is really quite different to shows I would suggest that it gets its own table in the database and the show schema remains unchanged. My technical skills are not up to implementing this but I think we should discuss design (and then ask for feedback from relevant people who do film in Cambridge).
Suggested columns for acts_films:

• Title
• Release date
  • Some method of working this out for serials with a series of release dates and episode names
  • Variable precision as at the start of the filming process, release date might just be "June 2019", but it might end up being "18:00 11 June 2019".
• Author
• Release method, e.g. URL
• A list of show ids where the film will be screened, e.g. Cam Shorts.
• Usual description, techie/actor vacancies, social media links, etc.
  This would let us do something like this on the diary page:
  
  When viewing /shows/2018-cam-shorts (or whatever show screens a short film), there would be links to all films identified as screened there.
  Any thoughts?

[philosophicles]

Whilst I created this issue, I'm not going to get involved in any specifics on this as I am WAY too far removed from the reality of Cambridge life to have good instincts.

My main comment would be that it may be better to start with some functionality requirements (guided by end users if possible) and work back to the database design from there.

There is also a bit of a disconnect between @hoyes 2015 comment and yours, @GKFX, 2018 one - I don't think this thread has actually reached a consensus on whether the goal should be "full" film listing support (on a par with theatre shows) or something slightly different, such as @hoyes 's suggestion. I have no opinions on this: it needs to be current and future users who decide!

[hoyes]

I'll also caveat this with a "this was the plan x years ago but anything's possible if enough people want it".

Regardless on our thoughts on short films, we should definitely rethink our data model for vacancies, (there are already some thoughts on #159). The idea has always been that if someone wants someone to lighting design their wedding reception (or act in a radio drama or short film or other esoteric event) then we should be able to list that ad without having to understand as much about their "thing". We have only fairly recently been unencumbered from backwards compatibility with v1, which means that the auditions blurb is still a text field in the 'shows' table etc so everything has to have a 'show' at the moment. All of this is now up for debate on #159.

I'm still a little cautious of making a move into short film listings to be honest, and wonder whether such a thing would be better served by a dedicated website as the life-cycle of a film is quite different to a show. E.g. I imagine a "short films" version of Camdram would have much more of an emphasis on viewing and watching finished films. Also, Camdram already does quite a lot and has always had ebbs and flows of activity over time so we should probably be a bit cautious about any significant increase in scope which creates an additional long-term maintenance burden.

But if this is something people are screaming for, and, say, if the student film and theatre community are sufficiently overlapping that a separate site wouldn't make much sense then it could be done. But as StuCuth says it should maybe come from a starting point of looking holistically at what sort of resource people who make student films need, rather than trying to frame a "film" as a different type of show.

[GKFX]

A seperate site would need a seperate admin team and volunteer time is limited. The skillsets do also overlap significantly (particularly for actors, who even professionally are obviously not limited to just one of film or stage), so I think film vacancies and role records do belong on Camdram. I also just clicked on a short film at random and recognised most of the names as regular theatre techies and actors.

My proposed design was largely on the logic that film producers are currently forced to list their films badly, and so it would be good to fix that. A more holistic consultation would be a good idea before diving in though. A good design definitly wouldn't keep shoehorning films into the acts_shows table. I'm not sure that hosting film descriptions/vacancies on Camdram would make people expect us to host the actual films, although if the film is hosted elsewhere then linking to it would be an important part of the UI. Perhaps a film society should fund a Cambridge film archive or something (with people information pulled from Camdram!), but it's out of Camdram's scope.

I like the vacancies separated from shows idea. Currently non-Cambridge-theatre adverts are being advertised on the Facebook group Cambridge Theatre; allowing non-show-related adverts would bring them onto Camdram.

[CHTJonas]

So my initial though on this issue (which I'll detail just for completeness) was to agree with @hoyes. I thought that if we wanted to handle films successfully then this would require such a paradigm-shift that a new site (or at least a new code base) might be a good idea. Just for the record @GKFX it wouldn't necessarily have to be separate admins and such - we could work some Apache magic and mount the new site under camdram.net/films for example.

However I also fully recognise that advertising vacancies and showing a person's roles unified across two different sites would be a nightmare, so I'm actually coming round to the idea that all this stuff should probably be implemented in Camdram itself. This does then beg the question of where to stop - what about Cam-FM radio drama shows or CUTV series for example? I'm not posing this question in a negative way at all, just wondering how broad we want the appeal of the site to be. The name Camdram suggest all drama in Cambridge, although I suspect the original (v1) intent was very much Cambridge student theatre (again, I don't mean this negatively but it is important to be aware of mission-creep just so we can predict how the site will be used in 5-10 years time if nothing else).

For me, the way forward would be a consultation with the community to see what students/people think outside of the dev team bubble. Maybe it's a question we can pose along with a few others at some kind of open meeting with the big name student societies present amongst general theatre-goers and -partakers? Would also be a good way to introduce ourselves to freshers say mid-way through Michaelmas and maybe help spread some new-found awareness of GDPR concerns around Camdram (see Gitter conversation a few weeks back).

[CHTJonas]

Also I really like your concept designs @GKFX 🥇

[GKFX]

I guess it depends on the piece whether something fits into Camdram or not. A radio drama has a similar lifecycle to a student film so it would probably fit fine into the same DB table and interface. (We might irritate Cam FM if we called their shows films though!) Similarly CU-TV serials are exactly the same as e.g. Wenlock and Jones, which has already been put on Camdram. On the other hand entertainment that's not really drama (e.g. a radio talk show) isn't really appropriate.

I agree that mission creep should be avoided, but there's a finite amount of drama in Cambridge; provided that Camdram is only extended where we've identified a genuine shortcoming it should be possible to prevent excessive mission creep.

Consultation is a good idea, I'm sure Camdram would be able to book the ADC bar at some point in Michaelmas and get some people from the student film and theatre scene together.

[GKFX]

Relevant stuff at https://github.com/camdram/camdram/projects/1.

[CHTJonas]

CUADC minutes from 20/06/2018 suggest they are interested in workshops being advertised on Camdram too.

[philosophicles]

Ha! Workshops was a feature added to V1 at some point after Camdram's initial launch and adoption. The acts_events table exists in SQL for it - it was meant to be a little more generic than just workshops, and looks like it did get used for a range of things.

I cannot now think what caused it to stop being used. The fact that the functionality was never on the to-do list for V2 before now suggests it was probably not being actively used when V2 was planned. But there are workshops/events as late as early 2014 in the database.

@hoyes , @ajf58 : can you recall at all whether events/workshops was on your radar at all when V2 was initially being written?

[philosophicles]

@alexbrett may also be able to provide longer-term memory of why/when/how workshops was added to V1. I guess it was probably either you or Mr Dilley that added it?

[hoyes]

For V2 it wasn't explicitly omitted, but IIRC even before V2 came along it wasn't a very frequently-used feature so I guess it was never very high on the radar.

Tbh I recently dropped the table as all the data in it was quite old so there wasn't much to gain from migrating the data. I wonder if it would make sense to just morph the current "performances" table into an "events" table, and make the show link optional.

[philosophicles]

The table was still in the live DB when I just checked while writing the above comments...

I really think we should keep that data. Not a high priority to migrate or to keep on-line continuously, I agree, but when there's an appropriate home for it once these DB changes have settled down, I do think it'd be worth putting back in so it's searchable (and viewable on a calendar if such things end up on a calendar).

Historic stuff can be interesting - we openly recognise that's the case for productions (being a large part of why Camdram exists in the first place) but I think it can be for other events too. Students of today/tomorrow might benefit from knowing what kinds of workshop were held in the past, or being able to search and discover that some famous celeb gave an acting workshop at the ADC once, or whatever. A large part of Camdram's implicit mission is to be the long-term memory that 3/4-year degree cycles makes difficult...

[hoyes]

I completely misremembered... yes acts_events is still there.

(I recently deleted most of the entities in 'ActsCamdramLegacyBundle', but a former version of myself clearly thought similarly and put acts_events in ActsCamdramBundle, I guess on the assumption that we'd add some UI for it one day...)

[hoyes]

Looks like this thread drifted off topic a little (#432 has since been created for events).

Is there a society that represents short films that we should maybe contact?

I think it's likely that in the next few months Camdram will provide enough of #159 that short films (and radio plays, CU-TV shows etc) will be able to advertise for roles on Camdram without having to create a "show".

[CHTJonas]

The Film Society appears to have a committee. Not sure if Cam Shorts do - maybe they're just a kind of pseudo-society formed from prod team members that exists on an ad-hoc basis specifically for Cam Shorts productions? (Note: they're seperate from Cambridge Shorts which seems to be a university-level thing.)

I think I've changed my opinion since the summer somewhat and am very much coming round to the idea that film listings is something that we do want to integrate. Certainly improved listings will help, but I have heard negative user feedback about films which create a listing that starts in week 1 of term and finishes in week 8, so that it spans the continuum of the diary, when that is in reality how long the filming/post-production schedule takes.

Generic events might be a bit broad, but maybe show, film/tv programme and workshop would be sufficient to cover most if not all bases?

[hoyes]

I'm not a fan of long "show" listings for short films too, but my understanding is that such listings are only added in order to support auditions/production team listings so are a necessarily evil until something is done with #159 (i.e. allow generic adverts). If people are creating "shows" for short film listings without any associated adverts then we should not be authorising them (for now at least) IMO.

Having said that I'll support a dedicated films listings if there's demand. I'm trying to say though that I don't think the fact that short films currently appear in the diary is a sufficient reason.