The data visualisation I chose was from the New York Times, for the article Dissecting a Trailer: The Parts of the Film That Make the Cut. Five of the ‘Best Picture’ nominees from last year’s Academy Awards were compared, showing which parts of the film were cut for the trailer. I chose the data visualisation for Argo.
Data shown: overall run time, length of each clip, and from which moment in the film the clips are taken.
The visualisation is well designed and informative. The sheer number of cuts and the way the graph jumps up and down suggests that the movie is fast paced and engaging. However, no graph is going to look better than the actual trailer, so for my redesign I took each tiny cut and showed the actual version. The width of each slither is more or less proportional to the amount of screen time it has, so 1cm in width = approximately 1 second of screen time.
My visualisation eliminates the original concept of beginning/middle/end, and concentrates on conveying the choppy ‘thriller’ nature of the film. The glimpses of eyes, fists, and faces shows the film’s very character-based plot and overall human sensibility. Antithetically, all the small snippets of living data made it feel very mechanical and statistical which is why I presented it as part of a script or paperwork of some kind, rather than a glossy feature film poster.