AuteurGraph Update: Building a Visual Movie Site (Demo + SEO & Sitemap Updates)
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Welcome to the first behind-the-scenes look at my latest project, AuteurGraph!
I walk through the core features of the site, from dynamic movie pages to a director timeline that visualizes career overlaps. I also discuss the massive SEO and data challenges in building a site with over 3 million dynamically generated pages.
Whether you’re into cinema history, indie projects, or web development, I think you’ll find this journey interesting. Let me know if you’d like to see more deep dives like this!
#WebDevelopment #SEO #WebDesign #AuteurGraph
00:00 Intro to the AuteurGraph project
00:33 Dynamic Pages Using Movie Database API
01:01 Example Movie Page Breakdown
01:35 Director Pages and Visual Details
02:05 Career Timeline Visualization for Filmmakers
03:03 Director Ratings and Analytics
03:48 Timeline View of Directors’ Careers
04:52 Film Movements Page and Historical Insights
05:55 Driving Traffic to the Site
06:30 Google Search Console and Sitemap Overview
07:50 Challenges with Sitemap Indexing and Pages
08:20 Future Monetization Plans
09:43 Film Movements Page Map and Visualization
10:18 Closing Remarks
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▬▬▬▬ Video Transcript ▬▬▬▬
I wanted to start doing these short behind-the-scenes videos, just to give you an inside look at the different projects I’m working on. I’m not sure how regular these will be—maybe not daily, but I’ll try to keep it semi-regular. I think it might be interesting to show some of what’s going on.
So, here’s one of my main projects, AuteurGraph.com. It’s a visualization of cinema history. The whole site pulls in data from the Movie Database API and covers a massive amount of content—literally millions of pages. I estimate there are around 3 million movie pages and other related pages on the site. Most of these are dynamically generated through the API, using templates I created.
Let me give you an example of what a movie page looks like. Here’s Inception. We’ve got all the cast, crew, and details about the film. Everything is clickable—you can dive into genres, release dates, user reviews, and even similar movies (though I’m still tweaking that algorithm, so it’s not completely exact yet).
At the top, you’ll also see links to director pages. The goal here is to visually represent cinema in a way that you don’t often see on other film sites. We’ve got pages for every director, every film, and every person involved in the film industry—from writers and producers to cinematographers. On a director’s page, for example, you can see their notable films, influences, and similar directors (again, still fine-tuning that).
Another cool feature is the Film Timeline, which provides an animated, visual representation of a director’s career. This timeline feature isn’t just for directors—I’ve also got it for actors and pretty much everyone else in the film industry.
For anyone wondering about the tech, this is a Next.js project, and I’m building it in Cursor. Here’s the Ratings page—another feature I’m working on. For every film, we’ve got ratings pulled in from various sources like IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and more, plus data on box office, runtime, awards, and even cast rating.
Actually, the whole project started with the Director Timeline page. I’m a huge cinema fan, and I thought it would be cool to see a visual representation of directors and how their careers overlap. So, this was the first feature I worked on, and it grew from there. You can filter directors by country and decade, and there’s pagination at the bottom.
Another interesting feature is the Gantt chart. It visually shows how directors’ careers overlapped throughout film history.