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Consensus

Our project is a website, so you can visit it yourself at consensus-reviews.com

Come visit us at our virtual booth

Note: this link is valid from 10am till 1pm on April 13th

About our project

Consensus is democratizing the movie review industry. Instead of being forced reviews from the big three such as Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and IMDB, we allow deep access into the thoughts on movies from thousands and potentially millions of people in an instant. 

Consensus is a movie review website that consolidates and analyzes movie insights from social media posts across the internet. This helps people decide their next movie with authentic movie perspectives. 

Unlike Rotten Tomatoes which hosts professional movie reviews, Consensus’ reviews are sourced from people casually discussing movies on social media sites which produces more realistic insights.  

In Metacritic, reviews are written as a monologue, but Consensus gathers reviews from active dialogs which are full of multiple perspectives. 

Unlike IMDB which has a cluttered user interface, Consensus will simplify the movie information displayed and provide an enriched user experience. 

Meet our team members

Jesse Hooper

A 5th-year software engineering student. Jesse spent the past year on internship with Getty Images doing full-stack web development alongside a progressive team that steadily performed customer interviews. As for skills, Jesse has data extraction and processing, web development, and managerial capabilities. Additionally, Jesse is interested in machine learning and video game development.

Lucas Longarini

A 5th-year software engineering student. Lucas has spent the past year working as an intern at IRISNDT on front-end mobile development. Lucas has strong interest in front-end technologies such as web development, mobile development, and UI/UX design. For skills, Lucas has experience writing full-stack web and mobile applications. Additionally, Lucas has interests in machine learning and data processing.

Daniel Heyns.

A 5th-year software engineering student with a minor in mathematics. Daniel spent the past year on internship with Ripple Group doing full-stack web development, as well as a focus on backend and security minded development. Daniel has an interest in backend functionality and securing systems against exploitation and inefficiency. In the future Daniel hopes to pursue additional education in security and data processing.

Shiv Odedra

A 5th-year software engineering student. Shiv has spent the past 16-months working as Front-End Software Engineer intern at Chata.ai, focused on web development and data visualization in an agile software development environment. Shiv has strong skills in front-end technologies required for web development and data visualization. In terms of interests and future goals, Shiv is keen to learn machine learning technologies and methodologies.

Details about our design

HOW OUR DESIGN ADDRESSES PRACTICAL ISSUES

From interviewing potential customers, we found that movie watchers often feel a disconnect between their personal opinion of a movie and what professional movie reviews say. Our goal is to bring authentic movie perspectives to the people, and from the people. With this, we are able to provide movie insights that resonates with the wider population.

WHAT MAKES OUR DESIGN INNOVATIVE

Typical movie review websites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic combine professional movie reviews and on-site user reviews. Our site searches across social media to gather our perspectives in order to gather deeper and authentic insights. Currently we are just using Reddit for gathering our social media data, but we could easily add other platforms like Twitter and Facebook in time.

WHAT MAKES OUR DESIGN SOLUTION EFFECTIVE

The movie data we grab from Reddit is from people being as authentic as it gets through having a natural conversation. Multiple perspectives are included through the dialog of thousands of watchers from across the globe. This culminates in providing natural and relatable movie perspectives that connect with the average viewer.

HOW WE VALIDATED OUR DESIGN SOLUTION

After completing the site, we asked general movie watchers to try out our site and give us feedback on the site. Overall, they found our site very intuitive with it’s easily-navigable user interface.

Additionally, we performed manual testing to check that every feature of the site operated properly, and also to time the performance of the site. This resulted in finding all features functional, and the site performant to our goal standards (having page loads within two seconds).

FEASIBILITY OF OUR DESIGN SOLUTION

The main cost of this project is the cloud hosting on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Our original goal was to have cloud hosting for less than $100 per month, but this has been temporarily exceeded with our current AI solution.

Currently, we are using GCP’s Natural Language Processing service in order to process the sentiment of Reddit comments. However, this is a pricy solution coming in at $750 to process 60 movies on average. We plan to continue developing our own AI solution, so that we may reduce this cost down to $5 to process 60 movies.

When we switch over to our own AI solution, the project cost will be brought down to a feasible $75 per month.

Our photo gallery

Try this out for yourself at consensus-reviews.com