In this project, our role was to design a high-class application for adding recommendations for movies, shows, anime, and drama. Users could create an account to become 'Cinepals' or add suggestions without needing an account.
About Watchlist
Watchlist is a platform where users can recommend movies and shows to their friends and maintain a personalised list. It helps users prioritise what to watch next and keeps a log of what they have already watched.
On the home page of the application, users can navigate through categories such as "Watched," "Watching," and "Completed." Each category displays cards for individual items, showing details like duration, release year, and the recommender. These cards needed to have a premium look, and we had to design a logic that would allow them to be automatically generated using movie information from the database.
To receive recommendations or suggest movies and shows to others, users need to create an account and know their friends' usernames. However, if someone who isn't on the Watchlist application recommends something, it's not ideal to force them to create an account first. Instead, their recommendation can be added to a dummy account with their name. The main challenge arises if they later create an account, resulting in two lists of recommendations under their name. We need to find a way to merge these lists efficiently.
We planned to obtain movie names from a database and scrape their posters from the web. The poster image would be horizontally flipped, made opaque, and given a blend mode to serve as the card's background. Using a dominant color picker, we would extract the poster's dominant color. By converting this color to its HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) values, we could isolate the hue. We would then replace the hue of a pre-set HSL value for the card's color with this dominant color's hue. This approach allows the card to be designed automatically using only the database information.
We have a "Cinepals" feature that functions as a friend list. Within Cinepals, there is a tab for dummy accounts, allowing users to easily locate and merge these dummy accounts. When a user clicks on the merge option, they can search for the actual account they want to merge with. All items (movies, shows, etc.) from the dummy account will be transferred to the selected actual account. The friend whose account was merged will receive an in-app notification informing them that a dummy account was merged with theirs and that their recommended list has been updated.
How can we work together?
Let’s chat and see.