Creating an Awesome Movie Catalog in Notion

Let’s have some fun. Let’s see an effective movie management system in Notion.

I am a movie buff. I love all kinds of movies. Be it drama, comedy, action packed thriller or an adventure. I am also a collector. I have been collecting DVDs from my early college days, when I had little money, I used to buy movies in huge deals. I even copied friends DVDs, guilty me.

As time went on, I switched from DVD to digital copies as I can own them for perpetuity and don’t have to manage or carry them. I can simply turn on the TV and can see whatever I want, if I own it without any subscription. I also don’t need to own dvds, it’s all in the cloud.

I am not only a collector of movies, I love to learn about directors, writers and their movie making processes. I try to find similar works like the movies I love to see. In order to achieve and manage all my movie data, I needed a way…

As like anything else in my life recently, needing management, I made a notion database.

Find the template if you need it:

I generally buy movies from iTunes with good deals and are of Movies Anywhere capable.

For them, who don’t know Movies Anywhere, it’s an online service, which lets you see your purchased movies from all supported platform like iTunes, google play, Youtube, amazon, Microsoft movies, xfinity, Vudu.

You buy once and watch them thorough all the platforms

I use these websites to see all the available deals

I have a huge collection of around 400 movies I have purchased over the years, most of them are purchased during holiday season with huge deals and some are free.

I have all these movies through Google Play, iTunes, Amazon, Microsoft, Vudu.

Not all of them are Movies Anywhere compatible. So I needed a way to manage and keep track of them.

Here is the notion database…

These are the ways I am using this:

1. When I buy a movie, I create a record with the title, director, genre, price, date purchased, provider, and quality.
2. The MA (Movies Anywhere) column let’s me know if any movie I own is MA compatible or not so that I know, if I want to see it, where to watch
3. The seen/unseen column lets me know if I have seen it or not; when I buy as a package, I get some movies that I may not have seen.
4. I group movies based on the director and genre, and the play count tells me what type of movies I may like next.
5. The price column and the date column help me to keep track how much I am spending every month

Automation

Here is a very simple automation I put on Automate.io to update movie data from Discord.

I am using Discord to update the year of a movie based on its title. Here is a very simple example. I intend to make it more complex to update any attribute. I will automate this process with IMDB api with a bot.

Next steps

I want to automate some actions with Notion API

1. Get ratings from IMDB and rotten tomato and add them in the movies
2. Update the play count when I see a movie
3. Update total movie watch time when I see a movie and understand how much time am using for entertainment.
4. I want to add thumbnails from IMDB via automation

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