Moviz

Motivation

Making movies is a matter of taste. Currently, casting directors may have to expend a considerable amount of time and energy consulting multiple resources to find the best people to cast for an upcoming film. For example, casting directors might be interested in variables such as which projects an actor has participated in previously, how large those projects were (in terms of budget), and the success of those projects on critical and financial scales (ratings and revenue).

Moviz, allows users to access these data in a single place. A casting director who uses our visualization can build customized teams of cast and crew and view team members’ information simultaneously across many variables. The user can form their own opinion about a team based on their personal definition of what makes a good team for a prospective movie.

How To Use

Using this tool, the user can search for specific actors, directors, producers, writers, editors, executive producers, as well as screenwriters and add them to a team.

Once a search term is entered, six matching individuals are displayed with corresponding spark-lines depicting either rating, budget, or revenue of the films they have worked on. From here, the user can select as many individuals as he or she likes and add them to a custom team. Each team member is added to a radar graph depicting the frequency of films in selected genres. Up to 16 genres can be selected; each genre adds another vertex to the radar chart. Clicking on a genre title generates the top six individuals in that genre.

For each team member added, three trend charts populate with ratings, budgets, and revenues for the movies that he or she has worked on. This gives an overview of career trends for the overall team over time. When a team member is selected by clicking on his or her portrait in the Team section, a Sankey diagram appears in the top right of the visualization. This diagram shows the top three people who have worked with the selected member as nodes on separate links. These second-tier links in turn branch into a third tier with three links for second-tier link. Mousing over a node displays the portrait and name of that person as well as how many movies he or she has been in with the originally selected team member.

Clicking on a node adds that person to the Team section. Clicking on a portrait from the Team section not only highlights that person’s trend lines on the three trend charts in the center of the visualization, but also shows each movie he or she has worked on as separate points. From here, the user can click on a point to view the movie name and its position on all three trend charts — rating, budget, and revenue.

This also brings up a final panel at the bottom of the visualization with details about the selected movie, including a movie poster, rating, summary, and list of cast and crew members.

Clicking on any of the cast or crew portraits adds that person to the current team. The current team can be saved and recalled at a later time; this allows the user to generate and compare multiple saved teams.