Flim: A bot that can guess the exact movie you are thinking of

Though in its beta phase, the site is already being loved by the creative community

Flim.ai is an algorithm-driven searchable archive created to help film addicts when they don’t remember anything about the movie -- except one scene.

Within a year, it already has the world’s largest database of film-related images. Flim’s unique algorithm scans through more than three lakh high-definition images from movies, documentaries, anime, advertising and music videos.

Its bot doesn’t just detect broader aspects like colour palette, genre and aspect ratio, but also identify details like dog-walkers, ham sandwiches, red-lipped Asian women, animated metropolises and any other clue.

Flim.ai is created by Dan Perez and Victor de Casteja, who have also produced various music videos and commercials, and worked in fashion, advertising and art. “I created Flim because I am mad about movies. As a student, I watched a lot of films and spent a lot of time screenshotting them for inspiration for my own videos,” Perez told The Hindustan Times.

Though in its beta phase -- to test with a large number of users under real conditions -- the site is already loved by the creative community. Only when he put the website live with around 40,000 shots as an experiment, Perez could realise that there’s a market for “iconographic searching”, as he calls it. Flim.ai is supported by French incubators Paris&Co and Belle de Mai.

To test out the feature when HT gave some clues to Flim.ai, it immediately connected the vague keywords to a minor scene from the 1999 indie film Being John Malkovich, which indeed featured a puppet of a nun as they had mentioned in the keywords.

While the bot is very useful for film addict, it's not the same experience for others. For example, for a visual artist with a unique taste, the idea of a bot being able to put together a mood board might not be very helpful due to the limited creative thinking capability of a machine.

When Prakrit Kumar, an interior design assistant, used Flim.ai to get ideas for a project -- the bedroom of a teenage girl -- he told the publication, “I saw all these American stereotypes – muted pink, ivory, a photo wall, fairy lights – the very things I’d avoid as a designer. In the creative field, a machine can only go so far, the human must ultimately take the standard idea a step forward.”

“It’s a handy tool for when you’re looking for something specific,” Sara da Costa, a Mumbai-based ad-film director, told HT.

Flim’s database also doesn’t have many scenes from Indian films, except for a handful of hits like Devdas and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. “It’s a drop in the ocean of Indian movies,” Perez admits, saying they have plans of expanding the database and getting distributors from different countries.