Founded in 2020, Paris-based startup Flim is a screencaps database collecting more
than 550.000 high definition stills taken from movies, TV series, anime, ads, music
videos and documentaries. New images are added weekly, making it the perfect tool to
get inspired and find quality images.
Flim is the first iconographic search engine for images extracted from all types of
videos. Thanks to a search engine based on the latest AI innovations, a whole new set of
search combinations are now made possible. Searching on Flim is indeed unlimited: you
can type whatever you want as concepts or visual references and you will get relevant
results.
To date, Flim users come from many creative industries (cinema, fashion, advertising,
marketing, video games, etc.) and many professions (set designers, costume designers,
directors, illustrators, etc.) from all over the world.
Flim search engine is a freemium model with a limited daily access. To fully use
the catalog, users must subscribe: 14,90 euros per month or 165 euros per year. For
students and teachers, the service remains free.
Flim is available here: flim.ai
A search engine designed for the creative minds
Flim founders Dan Perez and Victor de Castéja share their vision for the company:
“At Film we believe that image search should incorporate a deep visual awareness,
capturing an image’s artistic style and general mood, as well as its atmosphere
and composition, rather than just the objects in it. It’s the complexity within
cinematographic imagery and video imagery overall that is inspiring. Every single shot
is carefully conceived, composed, illuminated and decorated. It was our mission to
develop a search engine encapsulating the essence of this complexity and richness.“
The world’s largest video stills database
Searching for images on sites like Pinterest or Google Image is time consuming and
does not provide accurate and high quality results. Most images are almost never in
high definition and have no real artistic value.
That’s why reaching the 550,000 image mark is an important milestone for Flim. As the
global leader in this field, the platform has managed to collect images from all video
genres within a year and a half, focusing on the relevance and quality of each image.
Each image is indeed shortlisted by an AI and then approved by the Flim team. This
crucial validation step guarantees the artistic quality of each screenshot.
An IA based on neural network technology
Flim works thanks to an AI powered by neural network technology. Simply put, Flim
works very much like a human brain. The search engine both fetches images that
literally match the exact search as well as images that match the concept behind the
search.
This means that you can search in a simple way, in order to look for the elements
present within the picture as long as the engine has detected them like a watch, a
piano, red jacket and so on. But Flim’s engine goes even further and also allows you to
search much more complex searches based on concepts, visual references or proper
names. For instance Man facing the immensity of the world, The Last of Us video game,
the painter Edward Hopper.
Numerous levels of search are made possible
For a given image, Flim’s search engine operates at several levels. Firstly, for each
image Flim references methodically the movie (Mank, Martin Eden, Ponyo), the director
(Quentin Tarantino, Jean-Luc Godard, Adrien Lagier), the DOP (Bill Pope, Stéphane
Fontaine, André Chemetoff), the actor (Emma Stone, Jean Reno, Monica Bellucci) or
artist (Beyoncé, Orelsan, Die Antwoord) , and additionally the type of media (music
video, ads, movie, TV series, documentaries), genre and production date.
Colour is also taken into account on Flim. Each image is subjected to an analysis in
order to emphasize the main color range, allowing you to group those colors by hue.
About Flim: Flim founders met back in 2009 at the school of the “Arts Décoratifs” of Paris. They
both pursued their own careers in the field of audiovisual media before launching together in
2020 the perfect tool for creative minds to communicate their ideas: Flim. Flim is currently
accompanied / advised by three French incubators: Paris&Co, WILCO and Belle de Mai.