Origami Movie Picker
A fun twist on the origami fortune teller that helps you pick a random film to watch
Hey Dummies,
Y’all remember the origami colour picker we used to make when we were kids? I was reminded of them a couple of months ago, and I wanted to design one of my own that you guys could print out and have fun with. So, here’s an origami movie picker that helps you choose a movie to watch!
Here’s how it works:
On Valentine’s Day, I received a romantic, truth-or-dare version of the fortune teller with my Blinkit order. It was perfect—it was one-sided, so no fuss about double-sided printing—and it’s fun to put together and play with your friends. It got me thinking about how I could make one of my own, and obviously, the first thing I thought of was how I could make this film-related.
Quick look into how an origami fortune teller is structured:
There’s an outer layer, which can be 4 or 8-sided; a second layer, which is 8-sided and usually numbered 1–8; and finally, a third inner layer which also has 8 segments and is usually filled with the final results.
My first thought was to design an empty third layer where the user could fill in 8 slots with 8 different films. But that creates more friction—you now have to choose 8 films to put on it, and the whole point of this is to eliminate the process of making the decision to watch a certain film.
So, I started working on a movie picker that would give you one random film to watch. To do this, I had to figure out three things:
What each layer would contain,
How to generate a random number, and
How to link that number to a random film.
The first and third parts were easy to figure out. I already have a Letterboxd list with 250+ films, so I could just point the user toward that. The layers came together easily too: the first layer would be genre, the second would be numbers, obviously, and for the third, I had to get creative.
At first, I thought I’d include 8 different ways to sort the list so you’d get a different film each time—but that quickly fell apart. When you filter a Letterboxd list by genre, you get anywhere between 30 to 140 films regardless of the sorting. So this meant I had to generate a random number between 1 and 140 using the movie picker.
The problem? When you only have 8 numbers, it’s hard to generate a number between 1–140 without losing some (like prime numbers), and some numbers would repeat. It’s not a fair or random system.
I spent days trying to figure this out. Eventually, I gave up and turned to ChatGPT. That did not help—it gave me complex algorithms and too much math. I wanted this movie picker to have zero resistance for the user, and complex math is a big no.
I had almost given up on the project when one day, while scrolling through Letterboxd, I found out they had added a feature to shuffle a list, which gives you 20 films as output (on the app, at least). Generating a number between 1–20? That I could work with. So I got back to designing.
The only issue left was: what do I put in the final layer? I came up with 8 fun activities you could do before, during, or after the film. For example: write a review afterward, do a double feature with the lead actor, and more.
I stuck to a hand-drawn, handmade feel for the picker. I kept it black and white to make it accessible to everyone. I even designed custom type for each genre and number using my pen tablet and went for a graffiti-style look overall.
This was just a fun little project that made me think a bit beyond the usual graphic design process. I had to consider the physical product, how it folds, what faces show up where, how to design it so the user has least resistance, and much more. I got a taste of user experience, and I now have tremendous respect for UX designers after this.
I had a lot of fun making and using this, and I hope you have fun too—building and using the origami movie picker to discover films you might not have seen or even heard of. I hope it spreads a little joy, and helps you find new and meaningful movies to fall in love with.