By Steve Kupferman

A screenshot of a TIFF film schedule, created with tiffr.

The Toronto International Film Festival—this year’s edition of which begins next Thursday—means many things to many people. For Mina Mikhail and Ryan Ming, it’s become a software engineering challenge.

“I’ve been going to the Film Festival for over ten years, now, and every year I buy a ten-pass to the Film Festival, which is just ten tickets,” says Mikhail over Skype from London, where he and Ming, both Toronto natives, are currently doing web development for a social networking and movie streaming service for film buffs. “Sometimes I want to bring people with me, so I need to know how to pick like five or six screenings out of something like eight hundred.”
“I’ve seen year after year, it’s a really labour-intensive job, and there’s no tool to do it.”
It was a problem of overabundant data. Almost anyone else would have grudgingly dealt with it by hand, but Mikhail and Ming are computer engineers, and their approach was different. They started coding in 2008, and their creation was ready for use shortly before TIFF 2009: they called it tiffr.
The program is a TIFF-specific scheduling tool. Users sign up for an account on tiffr.com, and then they can create an interactive online calendar of all the TIFF screenings they’re planning on seeing for the duration of the festival, from a database of TIFF scheduling information compiled by Mikhail and Ming. The abstruse process of figuring out conflicts between screening times and keeping track of one’s “must see” list becomes, suddenly, relatively easy. Mikhail estimates that the site currently has about five hundred users. The pair have ideas for new features that they say they’ll implement in coming years, time permitting.
“We built it so we could use it ourselves, too. That was always my main goal, to just have a system so I could use it,” says Ming.
“Exactly. We would use it and we would save ourselves a bunch of time. But in reality it just cost us a bunch of time,” says Mikhail, and they both laugh. They estimate that bringing tiffr to its current state of completion (it’s still a prototype) took them about four months of “fairly consistent” work.
There are 339 films playing at TIFF this year. In 2008, there were 336. Each one screens several times throughout the Festival for general audiences, and several times again for press and industry delegates. (Though tiffr currently does not work with press and industry screenings, that functionality is under development.)
There is an official TIFF scheduling tool called myTIFFList; it’s available on the official Festival website, but its calender functionality is limited in comparison to tiffr’s. TIFF also offers an official Blackberry app (Blackberry being one of the Festival’s major sponsors).
Completely unaffiliated with TIFF, Mikhail and Ming made tiffr, they say, as a “labour of love,” and as a calling card to help them find work. They say they approached TIFF in an attempt to work out a more formal partnership, or at least to get access to film scheduling data in raw form (currently, they get TIFF film schedules by skimming them from the TIFF site with custom-designed software, which is a difficult and unreliable way to get data), but were rebuffed. Last year, festival staff asked Mikhail, who volunteers for TIFF as an event photographer, not to hand out flyers for tiffr at TIFF box offices, in order to avoid the appearance of such a partnership. He complied, after his second warning.
The pair haven’t made any money off their creation to date. But there has been some payoff: developing tiffr helped them land those sweet, film-related jobs in London. And, in any case, they consider their creation to be a philanthropic effort.
Says Mikhail: “Now that we’ve got it working, and we know that it does have value, we’re just trying to inform as many people as possible about the fact that we can save some time and maybe not lose hair making it to the film festival.”