The Kinomatics Australian Film Production Dataset

A Curated Dataset Describing Australian Feature Film Titles and Personnel 1975–2022

Abstract

This article presents a novel, extensive, and thoroughly documented dataset describing Australian feature films and the personnel filling ten key production roles on those films. The dataset is curated from public information in multiple sources and draws on further supplemental resources to verify, validate and consolidate this information. In total, the data describes 22,720 roles filled by 9,397 distinct people across 1,877 films, covering an important 47-year period in the Australian film industry. The authors outline how the dataset solves several problems for scholars interested in data that provides a historical record of the collaborative filmmaking process. In particular, to address concerns about known coverage problems with popular sources such as the Internet Movie Database, this dataset has undergone extensive manual checking to ensure that it is reliable as a source of information on a national film industry. Moreover, the authors have carefully and manually linked each person appearing in the dataset, which allows the dataset to provide a rich source of information for exploring the relationality of filmmaking collaborations. The inclusion of ten key filmmaking roles further expands the utility of the dataset beyond existing datasets which tend to focus on actors and/or directors, writers and producers.