Wrinkles the Clown (2019) is a documentary film about the viral internet phenomenon of the same name. I assisted on this film as a Contract Software Consultant. Early in the film's development, the filmmakers approached me with a technical challenge. The titular clown they were making a film about had received approximately 400,000 voicemails, which were stored in a Google Voice account. They wanted to find the best content to include in the film, as well as callers they could contact and interview, but were overwhelmed by the amount of data they had. I was tasked with coming up with a solution.
My contribution was a search engine and exploration system for the filmmakers to use. Since Google Voice includes automatic transcription and simple metadata (such as phone number, and length), I was able to build an index that would accept search terms and return any matching voicemails. Along with location derived from the caller's area code, I also added tagging, starring, and the ability to listen to the record message. This enabled the filmmakers to hire workers to search through the voicemail collection in order to find entertaining content and people to interview to use in the documentary.
The search engine was made using node.js, postgres, and nginx, and was hosted within the office on one of the filmmaker's own computers.
