Bechdel & Beyond 🎥

A new way to discover, review & share movies that pass the Bechdel Test and go beyond...

What is the Bechdel Test? ♀️

This simple test, also known as the Bechdel-Wallace test, was created by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel and her friend Liz Wallace. It is a measure of the representation of women in fiction.

A movie passes when:

1. The movie has to have at least two women in it
2. who talk to each other
3. about something other than a man.

What is Beyond? 🚀

The Bechdel Test is a useful but limited tool as it doesn't tell the whole story. The beyond part of our review asks the user to think about other criteria such as:

• How many women are in the cast/crew?
• What percentage of the dialogue do they speak?
• Do they drive their choices?

Features 🔎

Our project uses multiple API's but we wanted to build on their limitations:

• One of our core features is to give users the ability to share their own opinion on the gender representation in film.
• Beyond is our way of elabourating on the existing Bechdel rating.
• From these ideas we provide a web service in which users can find films that dont portray a frustrating gender imbalance, both on and off camera.

How to use

1. Clone this repo
2. Run npm i
3. Start the server with npm start
4. Run tests with npm test
5. Run cypress tests with cy:open (server must be running at the same time)

Movie Page

Tech Used

• React
• Jest
• CodeCov
• Travis
• Cypress to test user journeys

APIs used in the backend

You can find the backend API for this app here

• The Movie DB API was used to get a list of films. Search was done by year and 1997 was selected since Titanic was always comming up in our search for APIs to use.
• The Movie Open Database was used to get film details for a given film title
• The Movie DB API was used again to get cast and crew information for a given film id (provided by the first query)
• Bechdel Test Movie List was used to get Bechdel test reviews for a given film title

Future developments

With more time we would:

• Add a user page - user can edit their details, see all their reviews and edit/delete them
• Filter function so users can filter by gender ratio/ director's gender etc.
• Add playlist feature - user can create playlists of movies they like and view playlists created by other users
• Use infographics to display the gender parity data
• User testing with the final product

Credits

Built by:

• Chloe - UX/UI
• Ako - DevOps
• James - Scrum
• Gio - QA

Planning was done on Notion and Miro. Prototyping was done on Figma