Lights, camera, action! Its movie time on Histropedia!

Timelines aren’t just about history, they’re about chronology. They’re about exploring topics in a way that lets you immediately grasp which order things happened in, when they took place and how far apart they were. There are few areas where this is more useful than when exploring the magical history of film, or just checking up on the order to watch the Marvel movies!

We have hundreds of film related timelines for you to discover on Histropedia, all from the search box on the timeline. In this post we will share some of our favourite timelines and give you some ideas of other types of timelines you can find on Histropedia.

You can help us improve any of the timelines in our directory or even make your own timeline. And by the way, making timelines on Histropedia is by far the simplest and quickest way of making timelines, and as an added bonus it’s completely free to use!!

To make your own timeline just head to Histropedia.com/timeline, search for the film you want to add and click on the result, there really isn’t much more to it. You’ll need an account to save and share your timeline (again Histropedia is completely free and there is no limit on the number of timelines you can make).

You can read more about making timelines here, but before you run off to create a timeline of the best films in the world, you might to take a look and see what timelines we already have for you to explore.

 

FILMS BY DIRECTOR:

This is probably the most complete category of film related timelines we have in our directory and you can expect to to find a timeline for almost any director.

Simply search for the name of the director you are interested in and one of the results should be “Films directed by director’s name” (e.g. “Films directed by Steven Spielberg”

If you don’t see any timelines (results with this icon ) then unfortunately we don’t have any timelines for that director (check your spelling though).

If you see timelines results but no timeline of films directed by, just add “films” and/or “directed by” to the search. (The order of the words doesn’t matter; the system should find the timeline)

If you don’t find the timeline you are looking for, leave a comment below and I will try to find or create it for you.

You will also find lots of timelines of “Films produced by producer’s name”

When you find the timeline you are looking for click on the result and the timeline will be loaded, if you then load additional timelines you will be given the option to merge the timelines (this can be very fun for comparing timelines on different topics, for example Marvel and DC films combined in a single timeline or films directed by Martin Scorsese combined with films directed by Francis Ford Coppolla.

Did you know Mean Streets came out two years after the Godfather, and Taxi Drive came out 2 years after The Godfather 2?

 

Here’s a few more example timelines of films by director:

If you’ve managed to resist the urge to head off and start searching for timelines, or maybe you did and now your back, we have some more cool stuff to show you, starting with this embedded timeline of films directed by Martin Scorsese (click the  icon to open the timeline on the main timeline page).

 

If you have your own blog or site embedding timelines is a really cool way to add a new element to your post. Any of our timelines (or one you have created) can be embedded, learn more here

Films by genre:

Although not complete the films by genre section of the directory contains loads of amazing timelines. Here are a few timelines that we have for entire genres.

You can also find dozens of timelines of films by genre and country, including more sub-genres than we have listed above, here are some examples:

To find more try replacing the genre and country to search for more timelines

In time we will work at creating more complete genre timelines for some of the sub genres.

 

Films based on:

We also have a number of timelines showing films based on the same source material, here are a few examples of this type of timeline.

There’s even some timelines by topic and theme:

Try replacing different keywords from the examples above to find more timelines.

 

Films by studio

For the real films buffs out there you might also want to check out timeline of films by studio.

Here’s a few examples:

Again just switch out the studio name in the examples above to find more timelines.

 

Film timelines created by queries:

So I’m assuming if you’ve made it this far you love films and like the timelines you’ve found so far, and unlike most sequels we have saved the best for last, but be warned we are wandering into the very cutting edge of the features we have on Histropedia. The ability to create custom timelines based on queries is incredibly powerful, but the feature is still in a very early stage and isn’t as easy to use as the rest of the site.

So the obligatory warning out of the way let’s take a look at what you can create using queries! Let’s say we wanted to see films that have won the academy award for best picture where the main topic of the film is war, or how about films where the narrative is set in London and it’s a biographical film!

You can also use the queries to create timelines of films by actor (which we don’t have many of in the directory at the moment)

These timeline we’re made automatically (we didn’t add a single event) we did however have to write a query and run that query on Histropedia, and although not rocket science it is a lot harder than searching for the name of a director and clicking on a search result.

In time we will make it so that you can create these custom query generated timelines with just a few clicks of the button, but until then you can try experimenting with our basic query generator prototype. The generator is a Google docs spreadsheet which is available as template that you can download.

The generator lets you choose from a selected range of criteria (more are available, but to make the generators easy to use we have limited it to what we hope are the most useful) and run the query on Histropedia to create the timeline.

There is no safety net! Depending on the criteria you select you could end up with no events on your timeline or you might end up trying to add 50,000 events to the timeline and possibly crash your browser…. have fun!!

Film Finder Query Generator (Google Docs)

See all query generators

Have any questions, ideas, feedback or just want to have a chat about movies? Leave a comment below or tweet to @histrobot to talk timeline and @histropedia to talk about the project!

Talking about the project! If you would like to get involved in helping to improve Histropedia why not join the Histropedia-I mailing list – learn more here

 

Help Improve Histropedia

We are always happy for any help fine tuning the events and timelines we have automatically imported from Wikipedia and Wikidata.

Improving event precision:

Some events (especially films) don’t have the precise date yet (they have the year they were released, but are missing the month and day). Luckily improving date precision is very easy because the full date can be found easily in the Wikipedia article and editing events is simple on Histropedia, learn more here

Improving timelines:

All timelines in the directory are publicly editable – you can add/remove events from a timeline and publish the changes to the directory, you can also add new timelines to the directory.

Learn more about the editable timeline directory.

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TIMELINE OF CHRISTOPHER LEE FILMS

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