Building A Database And Web App For Ghanaian Movies And TV Shows
The Ghanaian movie industry is an interesting topic in Ghana. Currently, there’s debates about whether it’s even “an industry” considering the fact that it doesn’t have great structures in place.
Nevertheless, Ghana movies continue to be produced and released to the public for consumption.
The current issue is that it can be hard to find information about Ghanaian movies online. Who’s staring in these movies? Who are the production studios? What about the writers?
Finding information or data can be hard to come back even with a Google search. You’ll be lucky if it’s on IMDB.
So a couple of years ago, I started gathering data on Ghana movies using Airtable. It’s been an off and on project with me working on possible user interfaces on how the information should be displayed.
At first, I wanted to build a site from scratch and use Airtable to populate the data fields. But that was going to be a bit capital intensive and I just didn’t have that time.
Thankfully, I recently discovered a tool called Softr. It enables you to connect your Airtable and put together a website using drag and drop elements. That seemed to work perfect for what I wanted to build.
So I signed up and finally used it to build out the site.
It was much easier than I thought. All I had to do was use the Airtable API, connect my database and use drag and drop some UI elements to customise it. I cleaned up the formatting a bit and starting populating some fields.
In about a week, I had something good to go. This site is now live here: https://ghanamoviedata.softr.app/
The ultimate goal is to create a Ghana “IMDB” page where users can search for Ghana movies and get details including directors, movie runtime, writers and the cast of a movie.
I wish I had the ability to directly customise with the UI on Softr but I’ll just have to make due for now. I wanted to go with Webflow but using Softr was a bit more of a time saver.
This is a v1.0 product and it’s not perfect but I like how it came out. Maybe down the line, I’ll build out a refined version. You have to start from somewhere.
In the meantime, I hope to get more visibility for the project and occasionally update the Airtable with more movie information. Currently, it’s about 35 movies on there. Eventually, I hope to add Ghanaian TV shows as well.
Let’s see how this goes 🚀
