All-Stars Final Project Process Book

Basic Info

Project Title: MoviExploration

Myles Novick | myles.novick@wustl.edu | 444987

Noah Saldaña | saldanan@wustl.edu | 450041

Background and Motivation

We’re both very big into movies and in the past have taken computer science classes where we utilized a movie database to create an app. After talking about what our group wanted to do, we both settled on creating a visualization centered around genres and actors.

Project Objectives

We want to be able to visualize various descriptive statistics about the history of the movie industry. Specifically, we would like our visualization to answer the following questions:

• How much money was made by movies each year?
• What were the most popular genres during a specific time frame?
• What were the most popular movies of a specific genre?
• Who was in that movie?
• What other movies were they in?

Data

The Movies Dataset

Data Processing

The dataset we found is very fragmented and thus will require some cleanup. Specifically, for each movie, we will need to record the release year, genre, revenue, actors, and maybe directors. For each actor, we will need all movies they have appeared in and their roles in said movies.

Visualization Design

Must-Have Features

• A line/stacked-area graph showing the revenues of different genres of movies over time
• A pie chart showing the genres of movies released during a brushed period
• A bar chart showing the revenues of the top 5/10 movies of a specific genre to come out during the brushed period
• A movie-specific page with a force-directed graph showing the relationships between actors in a specific movie

Optional Features

• An actor-specific page showing the movies they have been in (and who they played)
• Charts for budgets/ratings
• Six degrees of Kevin Bacon functionality

Project Schedule

Throughout the course of the project we will meet on Saturdays. In week 10 we will work together to finalize our idea and scope out some potential data sources. In week 11 we will wrangle the data we scoped out in week 10 and manipulate the data to fit our design. In week 12 we will use the data to create a prototype. In week 13 we will ensure that all functionality is implemented. In week 14 we will clean up our project and make it visually appealing. In week 15 we will prepare our presentation.

Milestone 1

So far, our progress mirrors our sketches pretty well. One update we have made is deciding to color the bar charts by genre, and added posters to the axis:

Milestone 2

At our second milestone, we continued to improve the initial functionality of our prototype but continued down our checklist of items we wanted included. This began with a force graph of actors and their relations to other actors.

After this, we chose to revamp parts of the initial website and to make more definitive labels.