October 7, 2009

housekeeping post: objective ratings

As you probably know if you're reading this, I give every movie I see two scores, a "subjective rating" and an "objective rating." I've never been happy with my system for calculating my "objective ratings," so I'm changing it. This is detailed, and is probably just going to confuse people, but it's what works for me. If you don't care about the details, you can skip to the summary at the end or this post.

The old system was one possible point for each of the following which is particularly good:
(1) concept
(2) story
(3) characters
(4) dialog
(5) pacing
(6) cinematography
(7) special effects/design
(8) acting
(9) music
(10) subjective rating
It was purely binary (either point or no point). This meant that I was giving terrible scores to mediocre movies (because if they were mediocre across all aspects, they got no points), and mediocre scores to some terrible movies (if they had a few token good points, but were terrible in most regards). And it didn't end up meaning much to me.

Now, for the last couple weeks, I've changed my posting format, and have been looking at each of these points a little closer and giving them a sort of rating, from a truncated version of my "subjective rating" scale. The subjective scale is as follows:
10/10 = favorite of my favorites
9/10 = one of my favorites
8/10 = great
7/10 = good
6/10 = okay
5/10 = indifferent
4/10 = eh
3/10 = bad
2/10 = terrible
1/10 = eew get it away!
The "favorites" bits at the top didn't make sense when talking about some specific technical aspect of a film, so I ignored the ends of the scale and just used 2 through 8. Which is just as well, because a ten-point scale seems too fiddly for this purpose, but seven is manageable. In fact, I think I may cut out "eh" and "okay" in future posts, and just have five options: Great, Good, Indifferent, Bad and Terrible. Less fiddly yet, but still plenty of wiggling room.

I figure, as long as I'm giving these aspects individual scores, why not use that to create better objective ratings?

My new system: Each of the ten aspects listed above gets a score on the five-point scale, which is averaged to get the objective rating. But the objective rating is out of 10, and I want to keep it that way (ratings out of ten are just nicer...). So the five-point scale is assigned corresponding numbers on a ten-point scale:
10 = Great
8 = Good
5 = Indifferent
2 = Bad
0 = Terrible
The ten scores are averaged, and rounded to the nearest whole number. Notice that this means a movie with, say, a 7/10 subjective rating ("Good") will be assigned an 8 ("Good") in the "subjective rating" aspect for purposes of calculating the objective rating. Confused yet?

To sum up, The Short Version:

My "Subjective Rating" system is unchanged. It's just how much I enjoyed the movie, using the following scale:
10/10 = Favorite of my favorites
9/10 = One of my favorites
8/10 = Great
7/10 = Good
6/10 = Okay
5/10 = Indifferent
4/10 = Eh
3/10 = Bad
2/10 = Terrible
1/10 = Eew get it away!

Objective ratings are now calculated by averaging a score for the each of the following aspects:
- concept
- story
- characters
- dialog
- pacing
- cinematography
- special effects/design
- acting
- music
- subjective rating
resulting in a rating out of ten on the following scale:
10/10 = Great
9/10 = Very good
8/10 = Good
7/10 = Pretty good
6/10 = Okay
5/10 = Indifferent
4/10 = Eh
3/10 = Pretty bad
2/10 = Bad
1/10 = Very bad
0/10 = Terrible

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