[tjpnz]

I was asked to do something very similar at a film post production facility for credits. Essentially I was given a day and a half to reconcile spreadsheets of crew member names (compiled by department HODs) with their "credit name" on our employee database in order to create a master for the production company.

I had all kinds of issues - variations of names, mispelled names, nicknames, names with the middle name used as a surname (and vice versa) and a few lacking even that. I recall leaning heavily on tables of common names, various Python string normalisation methods as well as soundex. In the end I was left with a dozen or so names which needed follow up but it was pretty good for the ~1000 I had started with initially.

The most harrowing part of it all was attending the crew screening - it is actually possible to address issues on an end crawl (provided you catch it early enough) but I really didn't want to be the guy who screwed up the credit of someone who had just spent the previous three months in crunch to get the picture out the door.