TIFF Schedule
The TIFF schedule was finally announced on Tuesday, officially kicking off a frantic week where ticket package holders like myself must sort through hundreds of films to make a handful of picks for what to see this year. As per usual, the official Toronto International Film Festival web site has the full schedule online but as has become de rigeur in recent years, a number of unaffiliated groups have created user-friendly ways to navigate through and organize all the data.
TIFFR
Mina Mikhail and his friend Ryan from fightingtheboss studios have created TIFFR (pictured above), a web application that makes it simple to shortlist and create an itinerary for films you might be interested in seeing. Your schedule can then be printed, shared with friends or exported to Google or another online calendar. Check out how it works.
TIFF Facebook Application
Roy Pereira and his team at the Shiny Agency have created a Facebook Application that makes it easy to browse films and plan your TIFF film-going within the Facebook environment. The app let's you differentiate whether you already have tickets to a film or just would like to go; but the real value here is that you can easily check to see if any of your friends are planning to attend any of the same screenings. And like anything on Facebook, you can make comments and actions that shows up in your activity stream.
Film Fest Bingo
Filmmaker and freelance designer Jacob Niedzwiecki has a solution for anyone who wants to have more fun when deciding what to see at this year's TIFF. His Film Fest Bingo card is meant to be used as a companion to the festival's programme guide and the idea is to fill in the squares on the card as you come across descriptions of films that include phrases like luminous, masterwork and enfant terrible.
Not sure what to see at this year's festival? Check out our preview of TIFF 2009 and stay tuned for more of our picks of what to see.
Comments (11)
Tiffr is like fucking magic. It's all the more awesome since, keeping with tradition, the actual TIFF website is a giant pile of shit.
terrible photograph, why is that person wearing a mask? did he or she not take it off when exiting the Tokyo sybway?
Tim, were there no better pictures to add to this article?
If you're looking for info on the films at TIFF'09,
please check out, TOfilmfest.ca :-)
We have 2,400+ followers at Twitter.com/TOfilmfest
-- more followers than any official (or unofficial) TIFF account!
You can also get an full up-to-the-minute film list at
TOfilmfest.ca/rss or see updates at Twitter.com/TIFFlist
Tiffr is great, but doesn't have end times for any of the movies so they sort of span into eternity. There is also a feature on TIFFReviews.com where you can click to add a film directly to your google calendar.
Thanks so much for the article!
I believe the end times are now shown on the schedule and planner. The app helps you build a customized schedule which you can then share or generate a google/outlook calendar for.
Ryan - The end times show up near the film title but the block that the movie creates continues to span on.. Is this something that can be fixed?
Erica - We're definitely looking into this, but the short answer is that we don't have all the end times for every movie (the official TIFF site is missing this info as well), and it just looks really bad if we reflect the duration of the movie into the bar (titles become unreadable, especially when films are really short).
This doesn't really solve your problem, but the calendar output does reflect the duration of the films which you can then plot graphically in outlook, etc.
If you've got any ideas or suggestions, we'd love to hear them. There's a feedback tab on tiffr which Mina and I monitor regularly.
Ryan - Thanks for the info! It's not a huge problem, but my bf and I were curious about it. Good to know that end times will show up in my calendar though!
Okay, I lied. We've got the end times reflected in the length of the block now. Super excited about this. Check it out!
I think you should warn about the privacy issues with
apps.facebook.com/torontofilmfestival
i.e. access your profile/pics/friends
-- and why no mention of www.TIFFreviews.com (since 2004)?
This was meant to be a round-up of apps, not other sites writing reviews (which are too numerous to mention)
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