Briefing – Based on a student project, I visualized a data set relating to films and directors. To make connections in large amounts of data visible, I worked with shapes, colors and ordering principles. The result is a programmed, interactive prototype.
Year – 2023
Period of time – 4 months
Our task was to select a data set and visualize it. I decided on the "Movie Industry" data set. As the data set contains a large number of films and associated properties, I first think about which properties I want to focus on and which factors could be very interesting in combination. I formulate the following key questions:Is the popularity of the movie dependent on the director?Which genre is the most popular?Which films have brought in the most income?
I focused mainly on directors because I find guiding questions in this context exciting. I thought about sorting the films on the x- and y-axis in a grid according to director and star. I find it interesting to see whether certain directors have made more films with a leading actor. I find this idea exciting, but it's problematic to implement it via the distribution on the x- or y-axis, as it would only make sense to include directors and leading actors who have often made films together and this would limit my data set too much. I would like to visualize this factor in a different way.
The data set contains a total of 7512 films. Since I don't want to summarize these and want to show each film individually, I have thought about how I can reduce the number of films, as the scope would otherwise be far too large for the implementation. I filter the films by director. This means that only films by directors who have made more than 6 films are shown. All other directors and their films are not included.
Since I filter the films by director, I want to list them on the y-axis. The second feature I choose is the IMDb score (Internet Movie Database) as this represents the quality of the movie and its popularity. I find it interesting to see whether directors who have made many films have a higher average score than directors who have made fewer films. The directors are listed on the y-axis on the left, while the score from 1-10 is on the x-axis.
If a director has now shot several films that all have the same score, they lie on top of each other and you can't see how many films are in the position. To solve this problem, I change the transparency of the individual points. This way you can immediately recognize when a director has made several films that have received the same score. I also want to make the income recognizable and have made it visible through the size of the point. I find it particularly interesting to see whether a movie with a high score automatically generates high revenues.
As soon as you select a film with a click, it is highlighted in color and all other films with the same leading actor are also highlighted in color. I find it interesting to see which director has made more films with a leading actor.
I have defined a color for each genre. I find it exciting to see which genre has particularly successful films, or whether directors only make films in one genre or vary them.
If you hover over the movies, the hoverbox displays the name of the movie and further information such as year of release, budget and revenue, and the names of the main actor and director.
If you are interested in working with me or have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. I look forward to hearing from you!
© Emily Kühl 2024