Logic vs. Chaos - Organizing Your Movies

There may not be a more polarizing topic in physical media collecting than how you organize your movies. You can see and hear about SO MANY different methods that people have to organize their shelves. They may or may not make any sense to you...and that's what makes it such an interesting thing to talk about!

In this episode, Matt talks about many different ways you can organize movies on your shelf and how these can potentially be combined to give it your own personalized touches. He also weighs in on which methods lean more towards logic and which look more at embracing the chaos. How do you organize your movies?

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Music:

"Vibing Over Venus" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Welcome to Cinema on a Shelf, a podcast about movies and physical media. My name is Matt, and thank you for spending some time with me instead of watching a movie. I promise I will try to make it worth your time. I guess in this episode, I maybe should say instead of organizing your movies, or not organizing your movies, I guess. Um, that that is today's theme in talking about organizing movies in this episode. This is kind of a I wanted to try and have a little fun with this topic rather than just do a ah, here's all the ways you can do this, because organizing your movies like a lot of things with collecting is a very personal choice, and there's I think if you go online, probably a lot of debate about how is the best way to organize your movies, how people organize their movies in different ways. You know, there there are a lot of options out there, and it's like any any sort of thing that you have that you're putting on a shelf that you're organizing in some way. There's a lot of different ways to do it, whether it's records, CDs, books, you know, kitchen utensils, cutlery. There's all sorts of ways that people organize the things that they have. And you know, movie collecting is kind of its own thing, and everybody, you know, gets to kind of do it their own way because quite honestly, it's your shelf. It's your movies on that shelf. And mostly storing movies is just about having access to them in one way or another, and the way you organize your movies should effectively kind of work for you. So there's a lot of ways to do it, and we'll we'll dive into sort of how how every collector's mindset is a little bit different with that. So, as part of the fun aspect and and looking at this and not necessarily taking it too seriously in this episode, is I wanted to sort of talk with each idea of organizing. Is does this embrace more logic or chaos? Or maybe a little bit of both. Maybe there's a spectrum here of logic versus chaos, and how different ways you can organize your movies embraces one or the other, and how much maybe you as a collector choose to embrace one or the other. So don't mean this to be anything serious and just trying to, you know, have a little bit of a fun conversation to go with it. Before we do that, I, you know, we I think it's probably important to talk about why you would organize your movies. And, you know, like I said, it is your shelf of movies, and I think the important thing with storing anything that you're collecting is that it's easy to find something on that shelf. So whatever way you choose to organize your movies, it's got to be easy for you to find on your shelf. And that's kind of the most important thing. And whether it's just yourself that is gonna be using that shelf, whether it's multiple people in your family or roommates or anybody that you live with, um, you know, you get to sort of choose exactly how you want to do that, which if it makes sense to you and you can find what you need, then that's that's great. You may also want to organize your movies with specific aesthetics in mind, and we talk a little bit about that in some of the different ways of organizing. Uh, I I know there's some that you know are are really kind of out there, and I I've seen people doing things like organizing bookshelves and even movie shelves with a real aesthetic in place, and um, you know, shout out to uh a YouTube channel in the in the physical media space, Films by Color. DJ does that as his background. He's a great big shelf, and he actually organizes it like according to the colors of the rainbow, which make for a really fun visual. I've seen people do that with books as well. You know, every everybody can have their own little aesthetic to it as well, which may influence how you want to organize your movies. And as part of that, it kind of also expresses your own personality, your own creativity, potentially, maybe a little bit of how your brain works, which can sometimes be a dangerous thing to dive into if you really wanted to psychoanalyze it. But, you know, it it is a way for you to sort of say, hey, this is the this is how I think about movies. You know, if you watch movies a specific way, or if you collect movies a specific way, maybe organizing them in a specific way kind of mirrors that a little bit. So, you know, there's a lot of reasons for it, but I think the biggest reason it all comes down to is can you find the movies on your shelf that you want to find at different times? So let's let's let's take a look at a few of these. Let's let's have some let's have some fun today with talking about the different ways that you can organize movies on your shelf. And I do want to end it off maybe with a little bit of a glimpse into how I do this as well, and you know, you're you're free to judge on my own uh balance of logic and chaos with this. I suppose it's probably easiest to start with, probably the easiest or the first thing that most people would think of when it comes to organization, which is alphabetical organization. Plain and simple, this one's pretty easy using the alphabet. In my case being an English speaker, going from A to Z. Or Z, depending on where you live in the world, I guess, and how you pronounce it. You know, this is uh something that I think is is really basic. It's it's how a lot of things will get organized. You know, if you go on to many websites and are looking at shopping things and looking at inventory, you know, alphabetical organization is pretty much always going to be available with that. It's a pretty universal thing, you know, right down to libraries and using it as kind of uh one of the baselines for their organization. And, you know, it because we're all taught the alphabet of our language when we're very, very young, then you know, we kind of implicitly will know the order of these things. So alphabetical organization makes a lot of sense and honestly is one of the things that probably makes organizing movies very easy in terms of finding it. Now, if you can kind of really get into the language nitty-gritty, and I'm sure people do, of you know, whether or not you organize certain words at the beginning of a of a movie title. So do you organize it by the word the if you have the in the title of your movie, or maybe ah at the start of it? Do you put it in the A's? Do you go with the second? You know, there's a lot of nuance to that. Even using numbers potentially, you know, there are movies that have numbers right at the beginning. Where do you organize though those? Do they go before A? Do they go at the end? You know, how do you organize those numbers? Is it by amount? Is it by the first digit? Again, you can really get into the weeds with this, but ultimately, whatever you decide on with an alphabetical organization, if you do that, it does, as long as you your brain follows that, makes it easy to find things on the shelf. And when you go to kind of the logic versus chaos of it, I think mostly alphabetical organization falls under the logic aspect of things. Again, you kind of have a universal truth of how things are alphabetized and in order they go into, and you follow that. There is maybe a little bit of chaos in there, as I mentioned, about you know, whether or not you organize by titles the or ah or numbers or where those go. So there could potentially be an element to that. But I think for the most part, this is probably the method of organization that most closely follows a logical organization, and again has its has its advantages in a lot of ways as far as finding your movies go. Outside of that, we now start to get into some of the preferences, I think, the ones that maybe get a little bit more nuanced for people that may or may not resonate with different people. One of them has a little bit to do with aesthetics, as I mentioned, but not necessarily in the way of you know colors or things you might normally associate it with, but more in terms of formats. So I've talked a lot about the different formats of physical media, mostly, you know, from my own personal collection. What I collect is DVDs, blu-rays, and 4Ks. I maybe have one or two VHSs of things that I are you really aren't able to find anywhere else or on any other format. But for the most part, in talking about those ones, there is, you know, a school of thought as far as grouping those formats together and you know, saying, okay, well, Blu-rays maybe go here, DVDs go here, and 4Ks in a certain spot. And in talking about aesthetics with it, this is kind of interesting because certainly between Blu-ray and 4Ks, as opposed to DVDs, there is a difference in the size of the cases, specifically in the heights of the cases. So if you did just a straight up alphabetical organization of your collection and you have DVDs and Blu-rays, you are going to have sections where the DVDs will sit a little bit taller than the Blu-rays, as opposed to it being fully uniform. And I know there will be a lot of people out there that would really like the look of uniformity, of maybe having all of your blu-rays up in one area and DVDs in a separate area. 4Ks are a little bit unique to that because they actually have the same dimension of case as Blu-rays, at least in terms of height for the most part, anyways, and you you do get some variances in both uh both cases. But, you know, they if you're looking at sort of having uniform height along your shelves, which I know certain people will like the aesthetic of, this is potentially one way to organize your collection of grouping those like formats together. Now, this does require obviously you to know which movies you have in certain areas and the other things to it. So, in that kind of logic versus chaos aspect of it, this one falls a little bit more into the middle and maybe depends on some of the how you're organizing. I certainly logically, if you if you do like the idea of the similar heights of the cases, logically this would make a lot of sense to kind of look at that like uniformity of going from shelf to shelf. Uh, I think it's a certain amount of logic and pleasing to the eye that people will like. It does also, again, make for a little bit of chaos in that, like I said, you have to know in your head that I have a certain film on DVD as opposed to on Blu-ray and know where to look for it. Or if you have somebody that, you know, is just kind of looking at wherever they might look through the Blu-rays and say, oh, it's not here, and oh no, it's down in the other one. So there is a little more chaos into this one. It's not a completely chaotic method for organizing movies, but you know, I I think this one falls a little bit more into preferences personally. Going a little further down that road for preferences personally, and maybe leaning a little more into the chaotic aspect, is organizing your movies chronologically. So, in my head in putting this down, this kind of meant by the order of its release. Now, again, there's two ways to take that, obviously. You can take it as the order of when the film was originally released or originally came out in theater, maybe the year that it came out, maybe the specific day that it came out, month and day. Who knows how how deep you want to go down to that. You could also, I guess, in a way, organize by the the date of the release of the physical disc, which I think really gets a little bit more chaotic in that, you know, if there's a brand new 4K of a movie from the 1950s, then you would organizing it coming out in the year that it comes out in, which, you know, is is maybe a piece of information that's a little more difficult to find or difficult to track, especially if you're going back a long ways with tracking like DVD releases that came out 20 plus years ago. So there's different, you know, different ways to to sort of do this. You you could also go with, and I I know in this category, there's probably people that are listening to this that are in their head going, well, what what about autobiographical? thinking of the movie High Fidelity. Uh if you've not ever seen it before, there's a part where uh John Cusack's character Rob, who owns a record store, has a huge record collection at home, and he decides to go through a big reorganization of his records, and he's organizing them autobiographically, which basically is the first time he ever heard it, which is really ludicrous, and I'm not even gonna cover that in this. But they, you know, there are when I looked up different ways of organizing your movie collection on places like Reddit, there was usually someone in there making a high fidelity joke and a few quotes. So uh we're not gonna go down that route. But chronological is something that is, you know, a way to organize movies that again, if your mind really works in that capacity, or if you're thinking, okay, well, you know, I I watch a lot of movies in a specific year, or maybe you're collecting newer movies and you kind of go in a theatrical order that you may be experienced in watching some of them in theaters or seeing advertisements for them, you know, maybe that works. And uh again, this I think is a little more on the chaotic side of things because it is, you know, not really using any other of the previous methods that are maybe a little bit more logical. I do think there is an amount of logic that goes into organizing things chronologically. Does it make sense to me necessarily? Well, that's gonna vary person to person, and uh this this is not a method that I necessarily use. So for me, this would be a lot more chaotic, and it just isn't the way that I think about stuff. So I would say this probably leans a little more chaos than logic, but for some people, I would say it very much would lean more towards logic than chaos. So your mileage may vary on where that one falls. Um, if you are trying to organize your movies autobiographically, all the power to you. That's all that I can say. Uh, but shout out High Fidelity, it is a it is a movie I do really quite enjoy. Now, the next one I had written down is I guess maybe not so much a method of organization, but uh a way of having your movies on your shelf without really organizing them. Uh it's just having no organization whatsoever. Absolutely putting your movies on the shelf as you know, as your whims see fit. Not really having a plan, just knowing that you have shell space and have movies, and on they go willy-nilly, without any forethought put to it. Now, you know, this could be just a thing of, hey, I bought a I bought a movie, so I put it on my shelf. And, you know, I guess maybe that's a method of organization, but you're not really consciously doing it. Or if you're just watching a movie, pulling it off the shelf, and you just put it back at the end when you're done. Again, that's not really a conscious decision. It's just more I have space and so I'm going to utilize it. Um yeah, this is one you don't see all that often, I think. I I I'm imagining knowing knowing that I'm a collector and knowing that if you're listening to this podcast, you probably are also a collector and have put some thought into these things. I don't imagine a lot of you organize things this way or with a lack of organization. Um maybe and maybe I'm wrong. And if I am wrong, please, please feel free to let me know. Uh, but i I I think you know the the act of collecting anything does give and you know, give off an amount of like, well, I do really care about this and I do want to watch movies or find where my movies are, and having no organization whatsoever just really would throw things into chaos when you are trying to find something. So I think this is about as chaotic as you could possibly get in terms of you know organizing your movies on your shelf by not organizing them at all, obviously. Um would there be an aspect of logic to this for some people? I suppose there might be. I don't know. This is an interesting thought. You know, does this make sense in anybody's brain? It probably might. There is a there's a whole you know wide world of of the way people think and the way people look at the movies they have, and maybe it makes sense to somebody to do it this way, but I do think just by its nature, it is a much more chaotic process. So I I think we're leaning pretty heavily that way, and I do think this is the one that is most likely gonna cause the most chaos, uh, especially if you have somebody that's not you looking at your movies and wondering how the heck they're organized uh with that. So probably, yeah. I'm gonna go with far more chaos than anything else with this one. Moving a little more away from chaos now, um, going by a way of organizing your movies in terms of who puts them out. So in terms of like the label specifically that's putting it out, or the studio or the provider. Uh, anybody, you know, there's a lot of different companies that do put out physical media, and organizing them that way, sort of grouping them together by, you know, these are films put out by, let's say, Warner Brothers, or these are films put out by um, you know, a boutique label like Shout Factory or Scream Factory or Criterion or Ero Video. Um, grouping those together, if that's something that you kind of think about and are aware of, there is a certain amount of logic that goes into saying, yeah, you know, grouping these together makes sense in certain aspects for maybe the way you watch movies, you know, something like Scream Factory, let's say, or, you know, Shudder, or maybe certain titles that have a real genre bent to them. Uh, Vinegar syndrome would be similar to that, you know, where you're you're looking at, hey, I want to watch, you know, a low-budget horror movie, and you may go to that label that specifically does a lot more low-budget horror movies, or you know, I want to watch a foreign film, and so you're you're coming at it from a different way. Um, you know, I I do think that grouping the label releases together can be something that's utilized effectively for a lot of people, um, for a reason that I'll talk about in a second, too. There is an aesthetic reason with this too, you know, it was some some labels, and I think more this probably applies to boutique label releases for some of these boutiques that they do have some consistency in design with something like spines and artwork and maybe some branding that goes into them. You know, I I look at my shelf and look at something like my my Canadian International Pictures releases, which I've label I've talked about before. They do have their CIP logo at the top of their spine numbers, so you do see sort of a consistent like, ah, here's this logo across this way. You may also have a label like Kino Lorber, which for say their KL Studio classics, they do have the sort of baseline black spine with the the white thin lettering for the title that is pretty consistent through there. Some of the newer KL Studio releases do have more color in the title, uh, maybe on a slip cover or something like that. So there are some you know exceptions to that, but I do understand, you know, an aesthetic, pleasing to the eye look of some of those boutique releases that do have some consistency through that. I think you know, in that way it does have some logical sense to be able to organize things that way, especially if you're a collector that does really look at a label and enjoy them and want to collect for them, then maybe having that specific area where it's like this is my criterion collection, or this is my arrow video, or this is my indicator, you know, any of those that you where you kind of know that it's like, right, I've I've specifically sought out this version from this label of this film, then organizing it that way does make a lot of. Sense. Now there is an amount of chaos to that because you know some labels do all sorts of films. Some labels, you know, will do modern films, they'll do older films, they'll do foreign films. And you know, you do have to know where those are, or be able to say, like, right, if I'm looking for this Billy Wilder film, I have to be able to remember that while the Billy Wilder films are on multiple different labels, some of them major studios, some of the boutique labels, some of them have changed over time, you know. There is so there is a little bit of chaos in having to remember some of that. And again, I think it comes down to personal preference and you know your aptitude and personality as a collector, that if you do really think that way of like, well, yeah, I upgraded, you know, uh this film that uh let's say something like High Noon, where it got more of a recent 4K reissue on Kino Lorber, but has an older Blu-ray on all of films, you know, knowing that that was maybe a progression and maybe you upgraded to that. If that's the way you think about these things, then organizing by label may make a lot of sense. So yeah, it's kind of in the middle of that logic versus chaos idea. But another aspect of organization that may come into it, specifically with labels, is the idea of organizing by a spine number or a release number, potentially. And there are a number of labels that do think of their label or their certain lines as a collection that they number themselves, so almost giving them a bit of a checklist. Really famously, this is how Criterion has done it for years, even going back to their Laserdisc releases. They did always number their releases as they were coming out or as they were getting, you know, uh put into the collection in one way or another. So you may see a lot of people collecting, you know, those labels that do have numbers to them and maybe organizing them by those numbers. And you know, there's it's not just criterion, there are a number of labels that do this. Indicator does this, Radiance Films does this, um, even Shout Factory, the Shout Selects specifically that have been coming out on Blu-ray and 4K, they do have a spine number to them as well. So there's a number of these that you know you may want to organize by that. Uh maybe even release number, you know, with with maybe somebody like vinegar syndrome, they do have, you know, a little um it's not quite a UPC number, but sort of a like VS-025, and it's like the 25th release of vinegar syndrome. You know, if you really, really like something, you want to get down to that, and it doesn't have a specific spine number, maybe a release number is how you do it. And again, you know, anytime you're numbering things from from one and moving upwards, there is quite a bit of logic that goes into that. Obviously, you're you're just like the alphabetical ordering. There isn't really a number ordering in a lot of movies, because you know, not any movie is just given a number. It's like movie number one, Citizen K and movie number two, this, unless you really wanted to go into organizing by like you know, the the recent New York Times best films, the 21st century list or sight and sound. That's a little bit out there. That's not something I'm gonna talk about in this episode. But, you know, the the numbers starting from one and moving upwards does make a lot of logical sense. And if you're really into that label and know a lot about them and collect for them, that may make a lot of sense to you to put together. Again, it it is a little bit chaotic because there is not necessarily an order or rhyme or reason to certain films going into a collection and getting a number. You know, the the number one film in a collection doesn't necessarily mean, oh, this is the best or this is the first in a series of films you should watch in an order. Uh so there, you know, for for people that maybe don't think that way, it's gonna be more chaotic, even though there is an order to it, if you don't think that way about your movies, or if you don't think that way about a collection that you're collecting, then you know, doing it that way is is not necessarily going to appeal to you. But it is something that, you know, as a collector you can look at and go, yeah, I do think of this label uh that way specifically, or these releases by the spine number that's given to them. So it it it is another option, certainly. Now, the next couple of ways of organizing that I came up with are a little bit inspired by uh a cultural uh gathering place artifact of the past, I don't know what you would call it these days, but something that I'm like, oh yeah, I would often see this in this place, and it's it's the old school video rental store. Now, if anybody is super young and listening to this podcast, uh welcome, welcome to physical media collecting, really happy to have you. I think a lot of us were probably old enough to remember the days of the video rental store, you know, even from the big chains, the blockbuster videos, the Hollywood videos, the different big stores, you know, in different places, all the way down to your local corner mom and pop store or independent video store, you know, that had different stuff for different styles of movies. You know, there's a lot of ways to do this. But when you walked into the video store way, way back in the day, often you would go in and they would have movies organized in certain ways for people to find them really easily. And a lot of times they were grouped together by genre. So you kind of walk in and you know, a lot of times you'd have an area of new release movies, the ones that had just come out on VHS or DVD that you could kind of go to and go, hey, what's new? What's just come out? What's something that I can I can see that's a bit newer, uh has a new release of some way, shape, or form. But once they kind of went through that like period where they're no longer a new release, they were often grouped into genres. So if you had, you know, you'd go by a lot of generic ones that were sort of catch-alls, your dramas, your horror movies, your kids' movies, your thrillers, you might get even, you know, drilling more down to it, your crime films, maybe classic films, older films that are like uh, you know, whatever they deemed as classic films. Um, what else might there be? Animated films potentially, you know, science fiction, fantasy. There's a lot of different ways you can break down by genre. So if you went in and not really knowing a specific movie that you wanted, you could go in and say, you know, I'm feeling I'm feeling like I want to watch a horror movie tonight. You could go to the horror movie section and see what they had and maybe discover something new. Uh, you may also, you know, go in there thinking, oh, I I I just thought of a movie that I want to watch and it's a comedy, so I'm gonna go to the comedy section to find that movie specifically. You sort of knew instinctively where to go. So grouping together your movies on your shelf by genre serves the same kind of purpose as walking into the video store and doing that and saying, you know, I want something lighthearted, or you know, I want something, I want to watch a war movie, I want to watch a Western, or you know, I want to watch a maybe a foreign film. Then if you group them together on your shelf like that, you can kind of go directly there and see what you have, or maybe go like, oh yeah, I wanted to watch this and just know that, okay, well, I know it's this genre, or um, maybe have to look it up. Uh, you know, I think may this might actually be a way of organizing your movies that may depend a little bit on the generation you come from. Because I think that you for someone like myself that is in his early 40s, that you know, grew up in an era where this was kind of the way you consumed movies a lot of the time if you didn't go to the theater. And you know, for me, I grew up in a town without a theater, actually. So going to the video store was how you watched movies that weren't on just regular TV cable. So something like this, you know, if I were to go to a shelf and people say, Oh, I've grouped them by genre, I instinctively would kind of think of that as an oh yeah, okay, I I know a little bit of what I'm looking for, can organize myself in looking for a movie this way. So for me, there is a certain amount of logic in like my lived experience that would go to this, even going and browsing through stores, you know, any stores that maybe still have physical media around, if they organize themselves by genre, this is something that I instinctively will kind of maybe know where to go or what I might be looking for if I look in certain sections. So there is a certain amount of logic to this one, but there is also a certain amount of chaos because when you look at certain movies, boy, there are movies that you kind of go, like, what would this go under? You know, there's a movie like Shawn of the Dead. Is it a comedy? Is it a horror? What would you organize it under in those cases? You could make the case either way. So one person looking at a movie like that, that's sort of a multi-hyphenate genre movie, might say, Oh, it's much more of a comedy. I'd laugh my head off at it, or oh yeah, but it's based on the horror movie trope, so I would say it's a horror movie. And those are completely logical, you know, ways of getting to where you should put it on your shelf that could turn chaotic if you if if you don't agree with, or maybe that's not the first thing you think of. So maybe you're looking for a certain movie and going like, yeah, this isn't where I thought it would be. So this this falls, I think, in the middle of that logic and and chaos aspect of things. And it made, again, it depends on how you look at these things. It also might even depend on your your when you were born, maybe your cultural history, with experiencing something like a video store, experiencing something like going into a physical media store and and looking through how they organize certain things. Uh, you know, uh that I when I put that down, I thought I was like, that that's kind of interesting that different ages of people may actually look at that different ways because of you know the the history of what they have with movies. Now, keeping with the potentially organizing things the way a video store may be used to, there was one other way of doing this that I thought of because this isn't was not a universal thing in video stores or even in you know physical media stores these days, I've seen do this, where they organize movies by a director or potentially an actor and have a collection together of movies that a certain person directed or maybe a certain actor has acted in. Now, uh this was usually when when I did see this in video stores, I always thought this was really cool. Like thought that, like, oh, okay, this is uh this is a video store that is like catering to specific people about like curating an idea that was a little bit more, you know, granular than just genres. And you know, this might be somebody that would really think of like, oh, I want to go on and watch all the movies from a certain director and do a deep dive, or like I love a certain actor and want to see everything that they've done, regardless of genre. You know, it's it's appealing to a certain kind of like film fan or film fanatic that personally I I really identify with. I always thought that was quite cool. Now, this does add a real element of chaos to organization. Because, again, you know, where I guess it depends. You know, if you're doing it by director, yeah, there are certainly some films where there is multiple directors, or directors, you know, maybe directing specific parts, you know, whether it's a a multi-part film or one that, like, hey, there's four directors and they do four different segments of the film, or um, you know, it maybe a director is also like a producer and produced a film, do you put it in there? Uh so they I I think the chaos is dialed a little bit more up in this aspect of things. Also, if you start getting into actor ones, like the you might have certain films where it's like, well, you know, take a movie like Spotlight that I really love. And if you were trying to organize that by actor, are you putting it in Michael Keaton? Are you putting it in Mark Ruffalo? Are you putting it in with Rachel McAdams? Or yeah, you know, I the it it could really go all over the place. And I I again do think that it will make sense for certain collectors to have that. And maybe they're utilizing this for something very, very specific. Like maybe they have one favorite actor or one favorite director, and they choose to put all of those movies from them into a specific area on their shelf, and they just know that it's there. Boy, if you were to do that with all of your movies, that would be quite an undertaking, and uh, you know, would be something that anybody looking at your shelf would look at and go, Wow, exactly is this organized? Now, again, there is gonna be certain people that this really appeals to, and maybe it's a whole collection thing, maybe it's a specific section of a collection thing. So I it's not a it's not a negative against it at all, I don't think. But like I said, this is something that whenever I would see it in a video store or even a physical media store, you kind of walk in and it's like, oh, this is fun. I like I like that they've done this little thing. Maybe it's just a way to highlight somebody that they really want to showcase or their favorites. And maybe they're do they're doing this constantly. There was a video store actually uh where I'm living now that it doesn't exist anymore, but used to do a little bit of this where they would kind of curate collections and change it over time on specific shelves to sort of say, like, hey, in you know, October, we're highlighting like specific directors that specialize in horror movies, and then you know, going into maybe award season, it's like, oh, here's a bunch of best picture winners that if people want to go back and watch. So, like in in a video store and something like that where you're turning it over, it makes sense, and maybe you do this with your own collection, and you know, you just keep it fresh and keep changing things up, and you've got a whole bunch of time to do that, and that that's wonderful. But um, yeah, it I it it's a funny little memory that I have of of the video rental store that both organizing by Genre and organizing by director or actor kind of inspired by. So that that's maybe a little bit of my own personal bias showing in that, but I'm relatively sure, and even in looking some of these things up on Reddit and seeing, you know, people say how they organize their movies, it's certainly one that I've seen a lot of different times. Now that's by no means an exhaustive list. There are so many other ways that you can think of to organize your movies. And uh if you if anybody listening does organize their movies in a different way than this, I'd I'd be really interested to hear about how you do it. Because I think this is kind of a really fascinating topic. Like, there's no one right way or wrong way to do this. So if you have a way that you organize your movies, it's different from anything that I've talked about so far. I'd love to hear from you. Like if you leave a comment in on the YouTube link or uh even emailing me, you know, I've got an email, uh cinemaonashelf at gmail.com. Uh yeah, I'd love to hear about it. I think this is a fun topic to talk about. And I think probably one of the ways that I think I've seen really often in what people talk about and how they organize their movies, is using a combination of several different ways to organize your movies. So if you think of using maybe certain elements of what I've talked about and combining some of these together. So let's say you really like to organize, you know, your movies by label, and then when you organize them by label, you put them alphabetically. So there's two different ways to sort of think about that. Or maybe you have a label that's done both DVDs and Blu-rays and 4Ks, and you organize them by that. Or maybe you organize them in that way and also do them alphabetically within their you know format. Uh there there are there are a lot of ways to combine some of these. And that I think leads to a, you know, I where a lot of the personalization comes in with things, and where you can really play with that whole idea of logic versus chaos with this. Because again, if you you know are somebody that let's say collects boutique releases for uh say Radiance films, and you know, you really think of the films you get in terms of the genre, you may take your Radiance films and really group them by genre. You may also take them and group them by director, because they do have films where they've done multiples of a specific director or even box sets of specific directors. So, you know, there I think there's some really interesting ways of combining all of these aspects of organization and even using a lot of these within your shelves to sort of organize how you think about your movies and where you would find them. And this is a little bit of what I do personally. So I I did say I want to kind of tie everything together with a little bit of giving you a glimpse into one collector's mindset as to how he organizes his movies in my case, and how that changes actually a bit over time. Because I have had different organization systems with my movies and have have changed a little bit how I think about things. And most certainly, this is not going to be the the final way that I organize my movies, I'm fairly certain. But I I do use a little bit of a multi, you know, headed version of a lot of these ways of organization that I talked about. So currently, right now, I do have a certain group of movies that are we'll say non-boutique labels that are organized together by format. So I have my Blu-rays and 4Ks all together in one section of my shelf in alphabetical order. Uh, I I do, you know, like the way they look as far as having the same height with those. Then I do have all of my DVDs of non-boutique releases that I put together afterwards. And they all have the you know, the taller cases and they look uniform. Um, I do like the way that looks. This is something that I have not always had. In fact, I changed that relatively recently. I want to say about a year, year and a half ago, is when I started organizing them that way. Now, those are, for the most part, my narrative feature films. They don't include documentaries. I have taken documentaries out because I do sort of consider documentaries as something that I think of that like I want to specifically go to. And so I have my documentaries grouped together after the DVDs, because it is again something that if I feel in the mood for it, that if it's if it's not a boutique label documentary, then I will put those together. And I actually have them in different ways of alphabetical organization. I have my regular documentaries, I have music documentaries, because I do really enjoy a good music documentary, even a musical live performance. I sort of consider that in there. And then also a section about what I guess I would call movies about documentary movies about movies. Uh, you know, these would be things like the celluloid closet, things like the Moguls and Movie Stars collection from TCM, uh, things like Hitchcock Truffaut, uh, you know, uh a lot of lot of those that again, if I'm like looking to watch a movie about movies, they will go there. So that definitely is where I'm playing into some chaos in how I do things. And again, that's just a little bit of how my brain works. Now, the other thing that I do have in my organization that I didn't actually mention before, in talking about format, you could consider with format both movies as well as television releases. Whatever format it's on, you know, you may have a box set of a season or maybe a complete series of a TV show or a streaming series that's available on disc. I do have those grouped together as well. Because again, in my head, if I am in the mood to watch something TV related and go through like a season and binge a bunch of episodes of it, I'm in a little bit of a different watching mode than I would be if I'm just wanting to sit down and watch a movie or a documentary. So I do have those grouped together as well. And I I have less of those than I have of the regular movies, but you know, the ones I have are ones that I I would revisit and go back to and are a little bit more like special to me to go back into that. So I do have that as well, and I didn't mention that before, but I I do think that's something that people may also want to designate in organizing on their shelves. Now I have specified along the way here in how I organize it that these are for the non boutique labels because I do really enjoy collecting boutique labels as. If you're a new listener to the podcast, you can probably look back at my episodes and see that I do talk about a lot of different labels and boutique labels in particular for physical media. And because I really do think about a lot of physical media releases in those terms, I do have my boutique labels separated. So the the boutique label I have the most stuff for is Criterion, because I've been collecting for them for decades now. So I have a section for Criterion Collection, and I organize those by spine number because they very famously use those. And I've been collecting for so long that I do kind of have a little bit of knowledge of where movies fall in that organization, even though there are so many, I like 1300 plus movies in the Criterion Collection now. So again, that's a little insight into my brain and how that sort of works. But I have also now separated out a lot of other boutique labels. So Arrow Video, Kino Lorber, Indicator, Radiance, Vinegar Syndrome, Oscilloscope Labs, a lot of different ones like that that I have organized on their own and have put them mostly in alphabetical order, I think, for those ones. I may have those in spine number order, but I only at this point have a box set and two releases, the ones that I talked about in my Radiance Films label Discovery episodes. So uh I do for the most part, I like the spine number organization when it's there, and I do go with an alphabetical organization for it when it's not. But that's kind of how I like to organize what I have. It's it's how I think as a collector. I know when I look at my shelves where I'm looking for something. You could certainly ask my wife to find certain things, and she might struggle a little bit, and uh that's because her brain is organized very differently than mine. And so that, you know, it's it's logical for more logical for me than chaotic. It definitely would be more chaotic for somebody else looking at it, but I kind of like that. I don't know. It's it again, the it's a personality thing when you talk about organizing your movies, and there's no right or wrong way to do it. It it's it's your it's your expression, really. You you get to be the one to select it, and if it makes sense to you, I mean, who's to say that you're doing it incorrectly? Uh I mean, I know the answer, the internet, because I did do a lot of looking on Reddit, and people most certainly have opinions about how they organize things. But I think you know, the at the end of uh at the end of the episode, that's kind of the idea and the thing that I wanted to take away from this. And you know what? I mentioned that or my organization has changed over time. You know, I've kind of always separated my criterion collection stuff, but pretty much everything else I used to have in full alphabetical order, narratives together and uh TV stuff together. And you know, I I've experimented with doing it different ways and evolving it over time, and I'm sure my organization method is not in its final form yet, and I may change it depending on many different things that I haven't foreseen yet. So yeah. How do you organize your movies? How do you think about organizing your movies? Has it changed over time? Uh again, I I think this is a fun discussion, and there's a lot of interesting discussion threads, whether you go to Reddit or other message boards about physical media, there's a lot of different ways to think about it. And, you know, maybe that is something that you're interested in doing, or maybe you just have your way and that's that's the way you want to stick with it. But I'd love to hear from anybody that you know about their your method of organization, how it's changed, how you think about it. Um, yeah, there's like I said, there's lots of ways to do that. You can do it on the two I mentioned before, the email and the YouTube uh comment section. I do also have an Instagram that you feel free to DM me at in talking about it. Uh it's Cinema on at Cinema on a Shelf on Instagram. You can also see about upcoming episodes and uh other things that we're we're looking to do on the podcast. If you are wanting to do any other interacting with uh with myself, I do have a letterboxed account that I do track the movies that I'm watching, a lot of them on physical media as well. My letterboxed username is at Maddie236. If you're wanting to follow, I'd love to follow you back. I do also, I mentioned my wife, we we do another podcast together, a movie podcast called I Can't Believe You Haven't Seen, which we're about to come up with our 19th episode of that. So that's something that you're kind of interested in. We go back and forth watching movies so one person or the other hasn't seen and uh have a little conversation about it. And that is where I'm gonna leave it off for today. In uh in the next episode, I'm gonna get back to doing a little bit of a boutique label spotlight and talking about a label that is coming up on having one of their well-known annual sales around the time of Easter, and that is Aero Video. So the next episode will be a label spotlight on Aero Video, which is gonna be a fun one to dive into because Arrow has been around for a long time and do a lot of different types of films, which has kind of evolved over time. So should be an interesting one to dive into, and uh I think I collect Arrow video stuff a little bit differently than others that love arrow. So yeah, should be a fun discussion. Um, yeah. Looking very much forward to the next episode. Thank you very much for listening. Take care.