MovieClips, the incredibly useful site with thousands of short movie clips classified in great ways (I’d encourage you to read “Movieclips” Is A Real Find!), has just gotten even better.
You can now create your own “mashups” of their clips. In other words, you can search for a certain them — let’s say, cooking — and put the clips related to cooking together and save them. Instead of searching for the ones you want on the site, you have them all set-up in a row.
Even better, it appears they plan on providing the ability to “trim” the clips just to the portions you want. It says “trim” right now, but it doesn’t appear to work (at least for me). Their search system for the Mashups appears to have a few kinks in it, too, because everytime I searched for something I got the message “Sorry, No results.” Then, when I clicked “Search again with less restrictions” all the results I wanted showed-up.
I’m sure these are just the typical problems of new service. But the usefulness of these mashups are worth the temporary inconvenience.
You might want to read the TechCrunch post that shares more information about future site plans.
Larry,
We’ve recently made some improvements to our mashups feature. The trimming feature, while it was there before, it now much more obvious and intuitive.
As far as searching goes, let me shed a little light on that. When you type something one of the actor, movie, quote, or action boxes, that search is restricted to what we have tagged in that specific area. So, for example, if you searched for “twisting” in the action category and we didn’t have that specific tag set, you’d get no results. However, by clicking “search with less restrictions” the search opens up to other categories like dialogue, genre, and prop.
I hope that helps. Thanks for using the site and stay tuned for a section highlighting clips suited for educational and business settings.
Brandon Folkman
Movieclips.com